An engaging romp propelled by Susan’s infectious voice and determined resilience.
Illegitimate pregnancies lead to a career in lactation in Chapel Hill bookseller Eisdorfer’s inventive first novel.
Victorian ladies who couldn’t or wouldn’t breast-feed their infants hired someone like Susan Rose to do it for them. Susan, one of ten children, leaves her farm family in the English village of Leighton to work as a scullery maid at the local Great House. Soon, however, her Rubenesque figure and generosity with her favors lands her in trouble. After several meetings in the pantry with the master’s son, Freddie Bonney, she leaves the Manor; unbeknownst to her employer, she is about to give birth. Furious at the prospect of one more mouth to feed, her venal, drunken father Tom is mollified when his wife, herself a retired wet nurse, finds Susan lucrative employment as live-in milk source for a succession of families in nearby Aubrey. But she can’t take baby Joey with her, and he dies after being weaned too soon. While in Aubrey, Susan has a brief affair with a Jewish dentist. When work dries up, she goes back to the Manor and resumes trysting with Freddie. Assuming (erroneously) that Freddie is the father of Susan’s second out-of-wedlock baby, Tom blackmails the Bonneys, who farm out infant Davey to their London cousin, Mrs. Norval. Insinuating herself into the Norval household as a wet nurse, Susan soon discovers that Mrs. Norval is decidedly not the maternal type; in fact, she’s psychotic. Playing on her mistress’s delusions, Susan concocts a subterfuge, too delicious to reveal here, that enables her to rescue Davey from the Bonneys’ misguided charity. Periodic set pieces illustrating reasons for surrogate suckling reflect exhaustive research but interrupt the story’s flow. Susan is such an appealing narrator and heroine, however, that readers will cheer on her quest for a true home.
An engaging romp propelled by Susan’s infectious voice and determined resilience.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15576-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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