A well-honed work on surviving heartache, spiffed up by the shiny glow of Tinseltown.
Garnished with the glamour of Hollywood, this third novel from actress Kagan (Somebody’s Baby, 1998, etc.) transforms potentially hackneyed fare into a genuine exploration of grief.
The complex mother-daughter bond serves as the theme linking the randomly intertwined lives of three women. Chassi Jennings is a Hollywood star literally born to the role: her mother, Sally, was a three-time Academy Award winner; her father, Saul, headed a production company. When Chassi was 12, mother and daughter went on a girls-only vacation to Rome, where larger-than-life Sally was hit by a car and killed. Fourteen years later, Chassi is sent to Dr. Eleanor Costello to work out the cause of her `spells,` linked to that half-remembered day. For Eleanor, the therapy sessions are strangely cathartic. Her own daughter, Caroline, is Chassi's age, but they haven't spoken since the sudden death of Eleanor's husband. The lovable Jimmy was the glue holding the two together, but Eleanor wanted him all to herself, and now Caroline's last words (`Don't call me, Mom`) ring in her ears as a constant reminder of her failings as a mother. Near Eleanor's office is a cafe where Chassi stares at the wall before sessions and where beautiful, driven Ioni St. John pours lattes while dreaming of movie stardom. Though Kagan throws in all the ingredients of a soapy melodrama à la Valley of the Dolls, she gracefully avoids the predictable by creating complex people whose sad, stoic anguish resonates beyond the fashionable setting. As Chassi comes closer to discovering the truth about her mother's death while preparing to reprise Sally's most famous film role, Eleanor daydreams of Jimmy and makes tentative steps to reconcile with her daughter. Meanwhile, Ioni, with much advice from her strong-headed mother in Texas, climbs her way to the top.
A well-honed work on surviving heartache, spiffed up by the shiny glow of Tinseltown.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-15746-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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