Ignore the cover copy: The Group it's not. Still, Abeel's glib chronicle of the not-so-surprising lives of four friends from Sarah Lawrence's Class of `58 has its entertaining moments as heiresses take to the streets and ugly ducklings win fortune and fame. Daisy Frank arrived at Sarah Lawrence on a dance scholarship, yet she soon dropped Martha Graham in favor of a pieced-together writer's life that reflected little of her early promise. Such is the fate of her three close friends as well: saintly blond Franca Broadwater, plain-faced Ginny Goldberg, and glamorous Delphine Mortimer, a red-maned heiress known for her command to ``unhook our bras and talk about Wittgenstein.'' Despite the foursome's big plans for leading grand, unconventional lives, the passage of years and the assumption that ``art was just an exalted form of occupational therapy; you didn't sacrifice romance on its account,'' manage to thwart them again and again. Delphine's ambition to run a publishing company is realized by age 32, only to crumble as she gives up her career to follow her husband to Houston. When Franca's marriage dissolves in the face of her husband's swinging-60's infidelities, she marries her divorce attorney for the sake of the children, knowing full well that he's always adored Daisy, her best friend. Daisy herself toils for years in a publishing house before an affair with a wealthy older man leads to marriage on the rebound and finally a meager existence as a divorced mother of two. Only Ginny enjoys long-lasting success, first as a women's magazine journalist and then as a morning TV show hostess—but even she encounters heartbreak as her much-loved husband dies. All four friends have seen the depths by the time they reunite at their old school 30 years later. Tolerable entertainment; the least credible move by Abeel (The Last Romance, 1985) is to see to it that all four messy lives are tidied up nicely by the end.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-62150-X
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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