Altogether, a gripping piece of travelogue fiction spiked with an unnerving amount of psychological tension. Just right for...
A nice married couple from Brighton take a year’s sabbatical to Cuba only to have their not-quite-as-nice neighbor from home turn up there as well.
With this third outing, Barr (Baggage, 2002, etc.) further claims the very little niche that she’s carved out for herself. Her novels take a couple of young British girls with an itch to travel and throws them into situations that (1) they’re hideously unprepared for and (2) bring the unspoken tensions in their friendships into sharp and explosive relief—Alex Garland for girls. The tale this time modifies the template slightly by adding another couple into the equation: young professionals David and Libby. Libby has given up her high-stress but remunerative law position to raise their infant son Charlie, leaving her in the housewife’s trap: glad to be around her child but also uncontrollably bored and bitter. Meantime, David has the travel bug and convinces Libby to come with him on a yearlong trip to Havana. The story’s ticking time bomb is their neighbor Maggie, a pale wraith of sadness with a baby fixation so advanced she buys a set of baby monitors just so she can listen in on conversations in David and Libby’s apartment. Maggie (a stripper who tells everyone that she works for American Express) befriends David and Libby just before they leave for Cuba, imagining herself Libby’s best friend and David’s new lover—and then decides to tag along. Once in Havana, Maggie’s plan is spoiled somewhat by the arrival of her leggy, gorgeous friend Yasmin, who has a good grasp of Maggie’s fragile mental state and what she’s capable of. Barr could have quite easily turned all of this into a simple stalker scenario, but fortunately she resists the impulse (most of the time: the baby-in-distress climax might be a little too yuppies-in-peril for many tastes).
Altogether, a gripping piece of travelogue fiction spiked with an unnerving amount of psychological tension. Just right for the backpacker set.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-452-28503-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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