Not without its moments.
Jong’s first novel since Sappho’s Leap (2003).
As a young woman, Vanessa Wonderman was a successful stage actress. She even had a midlife run as the villain on a nighttime soap opera. When she married a billionaire 20 years her senior, she recognized that she was choosing love and comfort over adventure. But now her parents are dying and her husband’s had a heart attack and she’s reconsidering the choices she’s made. As the title suggests, this novel is a bookend to Jong’s scandalous debut. Isadora Wing, the protagonist from Fear of Flying, reappears—older and wiser—as Vanessa’s best friend. Desperate to feel vital in the midst of decay and death, Vanessa places a personals ad on zipless.com (another reference, of course, to Jong’s first novel). What follows is the heroine reflecting on her slightly wild past and her mildly terrifying present as she auditions potential lovers who range from the disappointing to the alarming. All of this is promising, but spending almost 300 pages with Vanessa is like enduring a trans-Atlantic flight with a seatmate who never stops talking but doesn’t have a whole lot to say. Vanessa’s greatest weakness—as a narrator, definitely, and possibly as a person—is her truly spectacular self-absorption. She drifts off into observation on topics like war and the Internet and female circumcision without recognizing that she has nothing new to say on any of them. Worst of all, though, is the fact that the culture seems to have outpaced Jong when it comes to sex. Vanessa wonders at the fact that she and Isadora are able to speak candidly of S&M; neither Vanessa nor her author seems to know that this is now the stuff of prime-time TV. Jong does have interesting—even arresting—things to say about age and dying. They’re just hard to find in this overlong and self-satisfied novel.
Not without its moments.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06591-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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