More dispatches from life in London's tonier sets as British writer Palmer (Old Money, 1996, etc.) wittily details treachery between the sheets, in the boardroom, and at the country house, all nicely avenged by a woman of decidedly independent means. The milieu is that resilient English society where titles count, money is discreetly plentiful, and eccentrics are admired for—well, their eccentricity. Charmian Sinclair has arranged her life most agreeably: She has her own PR firm, a different lover for every night except weekends—which belong to Giles in the country. And she dearly loves her half-sister Alexandra. But betrayal is in the air: Brother-in-law Oliver is summarily fired by Spivey, the sleazy CEO of Circumference, a large corporation; and Giles disappears, beguiled by a widow who's moved into the neighborhood. Charmian, who shared the same father, the snob and inveterate rake Austin Sinclair, with Alexandra, decides to help Oliver and Alexandra, who, despite Oliver's generous severance package, worries that he'll never work again. As Charmian inveigles potentially damaging information about Spivey, she meets cool, handsome, recently widowered Toby Gill, CEO of Stellar. The two are attracted, but nothing happens until Charmian begins discarding her lovers, sometimes by choice, sometimes by chance: One drops dead, another bores her. Charmian and Toby will meet again and fall in love, but marriage isn't on until some corporate raiding has been done. Charmian digs up enough dirt to deny Spivey a coveted knighthood, but Circumference is in even bigger trouble—as Toby learns when he makes a takeover bid, promises Oliver a big job, and then finds Circumference's stock is worthless. But happiness is at hand as treachery is punished and trust rewarded. Like a Restoration playwright, Palmer deftly evokes a world where vengeance is sweet, true love unexpected, and the race to the swift. A marvelous modern romp.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16843-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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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