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HERE'S YOUR HAT WHAT'S YOUR HURRY

STORIES

If the title of McCracken's first collection leads you to expect romantic comedy or even a light touch, forget it; this James A. Michener-award-winning author's characters are outcasts, and their lives are grim indeed. In nine stories—all but the title one narrated in the first person—McCracken investigates the lives of the freaks. ``It's Bad Luck to Die'' records the thoughts of a tall, blond, relatively young widow as she comes fully to appreciate that her now-deceased dwarflike elderly husband Tiny, a tattoo artist, has covered every inch of her body in decals, slogans, and copies of Masterpieces of the Renaissance. In ``Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware,'' a grown woman, a heavy drinker herself, remembers growing up in a house full of alcoholic men whom her father, a widower, collected like strays before he, too, disappeared into the nether reaches of the bottle, leaving the men to raise her. The 55-year-old male narrator of ``The Bar of Our Recent Unhappiness'' (``I am a man of many small mistakes. I am not competent'') quaffs beers with a young man whose mother is dying in the hospital room where the narrator's common-law wife vegetates after a car accident; in the end, the two men get drunk and speak incoherently of their grief. Other characters include a retarded midget, once a twin, who turns up at the door of an armless woman, an old acquaintance from their circus days; a 74-year-old convicted wife-killer, paroled now to a sleepy halfway house; a child prodigy who has grown into a disheveled woman riddled with self-doubt; and, in the title piece, an old woman who's made a career of visiting ``relatives'' she finds in phone books. Many of these stories taste of the writers' workshop—well-crafted but dispassionate and cheerless. An able apprentice Raymond Carver—interesting, but not to everyone's taste.

Pub Date: June 2, 1993

ISBN: 0-679-40026-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993

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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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