A sparkling demonstration of Hollywood’s hold on our fantasies—and its awkward fit with our earthbound selves.
Garbo, Brando, Sean Connery . . . the stars are out in one Ottawa home that’s experiencing video heaven.
Canadian Hay follows her widely praised first novel (A Student of Weather, 2001; Small Change, stories, also 2001) with this investigation of love and romance on-screen and off. Harriet Browning’s dad would not let his kids watch movies. Maybe that’s how her “disease of video love” took hold. Now, in 1997, she’s a middle-aged housewife and part-time teacher, married to architect Lew Gold, with two preteen kids, Kenny and Jane, movie-lovers both. Harriet and Kenny wallow luxuriously in film lore; only Lew is unaffected by movie mania, as he waits patiently for his wife’s return. But Harriet is an insomniac, and she’s also writing (but not mailing) letters to the New Yorker’s redoubtable Pauline Kael: a melancholy woman, Harriet, but also smart, sympathetic, and a devoted mother. Does she like movies because “she could love someone who . . . didn’t know her . . . but not someone whose face had been blurred and compromised by dealing with her”? That’s the heart of the matter. The question takes on new urgency with the arrival among their eccentric neighbors of feisty Dinah Bloom, a single woman, older than Harriet but still attractive; she too is a movie-lover, and joins the club. In fact, she falls in love with the whole family (as does the reader), while noting the dangerous imbalance in the marriage as she and Lew are drawn to each other. Additional complications follow, thanks to Harriet’s self-invited houseguest Aunt Leah, who reeks of malice (she’s the widow of a blacklisted screenwriter), and her bearlike stepson Jack. Will Dinah and Lew make the leap into adultery? Or will she settle for being Jack’s fourth wife (he’s wooing her with roses)? We can sense Hay letting her characters guide her through the muddle; the result is a variety of hard and soft landings.
A sparkling demonstration of Hollywood’s hold on our fantasies—and its awkward fit with our earthbound selves.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-291-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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