Only the vivid portraits of presanitized, pregentrified New York neighborhoods offer some relief from the sour monotony of...
In actor/playwright Bogosian’s third novel (Wasted Beauty, 2005, etc.), a successful middle-aged author finds another writer just as egotistical: himself, many years younger.
Richard Morris is single, childless and lecherous. The 56-year-old Jewish novelist lives to write, make money and bed pretty girls. Richard the lover belongs to the wham-bam school; as a thank-you, the lucky lady might get an autographed copy of his latest book (his fifth is just out). Recovering from heart surgery in his Connecticut country house in 2006, Richard stumbles on journals he’d written 30 years ago; the narrative from that point on alternates between the journal entries of Richard the Elder and the Younger. The latter is getting his bearings in New York. He shares a Manhattan apartment with an Israeli and a sexy Polish poet working at a real-estate agency. Richard makes a living answering phones at a video-art company in SoHo—still an actual artists’ colony in the 1970s—but he lives to get wasted, get laid and write up a storm, secretly taping his encounters to use as material for his stories. (Never trust a writer.) This will get him into trouble with Big John, a freaky pot dealer who generously shares his encyclopedic knowledge in his Williamsburg loft. Though Richard the Elder claims to be embarrassed by the excesses of his young self, all that really separates them is the beginner’s boundless energy. Both men are self-pitying, self-involved loners, and a little of this goes a long way, as Bogosian relentlessly hammers home his point. While his previous novels showcased a range of characters, here Richard sucks up all the oxygen. The revelations pile up; the self-portrait darkens to include a conveniently forgotten rape. At the end, Richard tracks down Big John, now a schizo in a nut house, and messes with his old lady and their son. It’s a gratuitous twist of the knife.
Only the vivid portraits of presanitized, pregentrified New York neighborhoods offer some relief from the sour monotony of the two Richards’ escapades.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3409-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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