From novelist Hower (Night Train Blues, 1996, etc.), a generous but unconvincing portrait of a fragile cowgirl who finds love at rehab. Twenty-one-year-old June is a tough-but-tender six foot one redhead who vows to give up booze after a violent brawl in a Wyoming bar. She narrates her stint at The Pines, a New England country-clubbish rehab and psychiatric hospital where the patients are called ``guests'' and the women wear pearls to dinner. June perks up when someone her age arrives: Jack is a scruffy and laconic sometime college student hung up on another woman. After some initial spats, though, the two start taking walks and talking. Jack reveals childhood trauma, and June talks about her brother Bobby, who shot himself. Meantime, June's avuncular shrink helps her realize how responsible she's felt for her brother's attempted suicide, while her various patient pals indulge in antic goings-on. But despite a tendency to be caretaker at large, June's bravado breaks down over Jack: Are they friends or are they flirting? Her sole experience with men consists of being groped and assaulted by drunken cowboys. Can she handle sober, friendly sex? Well, she can, actually, because she and Jack are unguarded, honest, and wildly attracted to each other. But the new attachment brings a new fear: What will happen to the affair after they've both been discharged? In spite of occasional powerful moments, such as an outbreak of collective hostility among the patients during a screening of Suddenly Last Summer, the action lags for most part, punctuated only by actings out, and by June and Jack's far- fetched romance. Worse, June remains a cipher: while she's portrayed as a popular den-mother who's both tomboyish and vulnerable, her character seems more self-consciously eccentric than genuinely confused. An inoffensive fairy tale, then, of speedy healing and plain-talking young love.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-877946-92-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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
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
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