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THE LADIES' MAN

A romantic comedy of errors by the novelist whose previous labors in this vineyard (Isabel’s Bed, 1995, etc.) have established her as a master hand. Harvey Nash is the sort of fellow your mother warned you about. Genial, good-hearted, and sincere, he genuinely likes the company of women and is attentive to their moods and concerns. All the worse for the women who fall for him, then, since he’s an incorrigible bachelor who can—t commit himself—almost literally—on pain of law. Harvey left his native Boston quite abruptly on the evening of March 11, 1967—and it’s no coincidence that that was the night his engagement to Adele Dobbin was to have been announced at a big party at the Copley Plaza. When he stopped running, Harvey found himself in California, where he settled in Los Angeles (as “Nash Harvey—) and established a successful career in advertising. Almost 30 years later, he has a live- in girlfriend, Dina, who wants (very badly) to settle down and get pregnant. But, again, Harvey just can—t see his way clear. So now he reverses course and heads back to Boston to look up Adele—but not before hooking up with Cynthia John, a sharp-eyed investor who sits next to him on the plane. In Boston, Adele is still unmarried and lives in a kind of bitch-goddess convent with Lois and Kathleen, her equally unattached sisters. She’s understandably less than thrilled to find Harvey on her doorstep, but Lois (who always had a thing for him) tries to welcome him back into the fold. Meanwhile, Dina is cruising beaches and coffee-bars in search of an (unwitting) semen donor, and Harvey and Cynthia are having some drama of their own. The course of true love is seldom a straight line, true enough. But can it be a series of overlapping circles? Funny, dumb, good-natured, predictable, and slick: Lipman knows what she wants to do and does it very well.

Pub Date: June 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-679-45694-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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