Intelligent and reflective, but curiously unmoving.
British novelist Freud (Summer at Gaglow, 1998, etc.) traces two adulterous love affairs, separated by half a century, in the seaside village of Steerborough.
German refugee Max Meyer arrives there in 1953, struggling to regain a sense of purpose after the death of his sister. Fifty years later, Lily Brannan rents a cottage in Steerborough so she can research her architecture school project about the work of Klaus Lehmann, who like Max fled Germany for England to escape Nazi persecution of Jews. In fact, we learn as the two stories unfold in parallels that are almost too neat, Max met Klaus and fell in love with his wife Elsa during the summer of ’53. As Lily reads Klaus’s letters to Elsa from the 1930s, when he traveled frequently to foster his career but sent hectoring missives home, similarities also become apparent between Klaus’s attempts to direct his beloved’s life from afar and Lily’s fraught relationship with her ambitious, controlling boyfriend Nick, a rising young London architect. Freud vividly sketches the quiet charms of village life as Max becomes immersed in his effort to paint every house in Steerborough on a single paper scroll, and as Lily considers moving there permanently as her frustration with Nick rises and her attraction to a young father with a troubled wife grows. Though the Holocaust is never mentioned directly, the German characters’ memories impart a sense of menace, heightened by references to Steerborough’s susceptibility to flooding. Rising waters provoke the climax of both stories, and Max’s and Lily’s affairs both end sadly, although the author gives one of her protagonists a tentative second chance at love. Freud writes with elegance, intertwines many complex narrative threads with impressive skill, and limns her characters’ psychological states with acuity; she also provides astute insights into the creative process in a series of letters from Max’s fictional mentor. Indeed, The Sea House is perhaps a little too accomplished for its own good, somewhat scanting the messy ambiguities of real life for the admittedly considerable satisfactions of highly polished art.
Intelligent and reflective, but curiously unmoving.Pub Date: April 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056549-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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