Wagner’s clean, sturdy prose imparts an inevitability to what is taboo, but some gratuitous mystification prevents a...
The elemental passions of two siblings fuel this first novel, whose contemporary trappings fall away to reveal a fable outside time.
Janet and Stephen are lovers in a vaguely defined England. They are youngish and have careers in the arts and live together in low-key harmony. Janet gets a call from a lawyer: Her mother died three weeks ago and has left her a small house. Janet is startled; surely her mother died years ago in America? Still, she drives north, alone; though she suffers from seizures, brief electrical storms in her head, she can handle them. The tiny, remote house is by the sea. Outside is a stranger named Tom, a garage mechanic. They have matching keys. Janet’s protests that she is the sole legal owner fall on deaf ears; Tom’s in possession. Into this straightforward narrative Wagner (Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters, 2001, etc.), the American-born literary editor of The Times of London, has inserted memories—Tom’s, of being raised alone by his mother (who would eventually abandon him); and Janet’s, of being raised alone by her father in America. Tom’s mother told him fairy tales, of a mother abandoning her baby for a magical seafaring lover, of a seal who could change into a woman. Janet’s father’s stories were based in reality: traveling to England on a liner, meeting the love of his life, returning with his bride. The turning-point comes when Janet smashes her cell phone; there will be no return to Stephen. She is not afraid of Tom; they share the same mother. Blood is calling to blood. Barriers dissolve as Tom and Janet make love and later swim alongside a pair of seals. They share a feeling of loss, but they have found each other, and the chance to make a new home (a key concept).
Wagner’s clean, sturdy prose imparts an inevitability to what is taboo, but some gratuitous mystification prevents a complete surrender to her spell.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06148-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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