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SAY WHEN

Contrived and sentimental, though Berg (True to Form, 2002, etc.) writes neatly packed and fluid prose.

Breaking up is hard to do, and breaking up with Santa almost impossible.

Frank Griffin has an inkling that his wife Ellen is fooling around with Peter, her basic auto mechanics course instructor. After ten years of marriage and the birth of their adorably precocious daughter Zoe, Ellen tells Frank she wants a divorce. She explains, coolly, that she never “believed in romantic love” until the ponytail-sporting mechanic came along and dazzled her. She asks Frank to move out, but he won’t budge. Problem is, he still loves her. They reluctantly agree to live as roommates, alternating nights out. In an effort to stifle the probing questions of her inquisitive eight-year-old, Ellen tells Zoe she’s taking a quilting class that often runs implausibly late. Frank throws out his wedding ring and tries directing his energies toward becoming a part-time mall Santa. More from spite than anything else, he begins dating the Christmas coordinator, Donna, a blond divorcée who is incredibly understanding of his needs. Most of the time, though, Frank sits around inventing nicknames for Peter (Oil Pan King, Mr. Points and Plugs), wallowing in the muck of his own unrequited desire for Ellen, and having exhaustive, watered-down-feminism chats with Zoe. Fed up with the fights and relentless sarcasm, Ellen decides to get her own apartment. What follows are fruitless yearnings, the immeasurable comfort of good ice-cream, overtly metaphorical dreams, bouts of self-help dating, and the limited strivings of Frank to understand where it all went wrong. The story, for all its nuances, hinges on just two questions: Will Ellen’s relationship with Peter last? Can Frank’s cunning use of passive aggression and belittling jabs lure Ellen home again? The answers arrive just in time for Christmas.

Contrived and sentimental, though Berg (True to Form, 2002, etc.) writes neatly packed and fluid prose.

Pub Date: June 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-7434-1136-6

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003

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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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