Melancholy soap from the author of Night Crossing (2001), etc., fraught with coincidence and banal philosophizing about...
Maudlin tale of a tragic accident on Christmas Eve. Years haven’t dimmed the memory of that awful night for Terry McQuinn, a handyman’s son from a small island off the coast of Maine. He’s never forgotten his humble origins, either, even though he’s now a million-dollar dealmaker in Hollywood. As a boy, he often helped his dad open up the vacation houses of the wealthy summer people. And one fateful winter afternoon, he went with rich Mr. Halworth and his daughter Katherine on a ride to the hospital. Mr. Halworth liked to dress up as Santa for the sick kids, dabbing whipped cream on their noses and telling a few jokes. But he lost control of his Cadillac on the ice, striking and killing a young woman and her baby. The memory haunts Terry still. And whatever happened to Katherine? He finds out when he comes back to Maine after his father’s death. It turns out that Mr. Halworth was a simple man at heart; in fact, what he really wanted was just to be a carpenter like Terry’s dad—a notion the ambitious, social-climbing Mrs. Halworth detested. The Halworths divorced after the accident and Mr. Halworth disappeared. Terry moved up in the world, though he’s still a thoughtful soul, given to musing on the meaning of it all. When he encounters Katherine (who is brave) and her adopted daughter Olivia (who is blind) out by the old house she’s inherited, he’s immediately smitten. There must be something he can do for this lovely single mother . . . . Hey, how about finding her long-lost father? Even though Mr. Halworth is homeless and living on the streets of Boston, his sanity shattered, Terry manages to get him back to Maine just in time, saving daughter and granddaughter from the teeth of a terrible gale. Happiness of a sort awaits all . . . .
Melancholy soap from the author of Night Crossing (2001), etc., fraught with coincidence and banal philosophizing about nothing much.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-2231-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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