A collection of sordid short fiction about sex, initially seductive but ultimately disappointing. Lau (Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, not reviewed) tackles the difficult topic of the dark underworld of female sexuality. Her women reveal a surreal mixture of strengths and weaknesses: They dominate men with everything from pretty young faces to black stilettos to the handles of wooden spoons, while falling victim to mind-numbing drugs, vicious male strength, and their desperate need for money. Often women appear to be controlling men: In ``The Session,'' Mary forces the wimpy son of an invalid mother to bring her wine on his knees, lick the bottoms of her shoes, and thank her for thrashing a spiked collar across his buttocks; the narrator of the title story manipulates a drunk, lonely old man into paying her hundreds of dollars to keep him company. Other times, women are at the mercy of brutal men: In ``Roses,'' an 18-year-old accepts the drugs and beatings of her psychiatrist paramour, certain he's acting out of the purest love; while ``Pleasure'' shows a woman frustrated by a hopeless affair with a married man succumbing to the lashings of a stranger, taking comfort in his absolute power over her and the fact that she can't be held responsible for anything that happens. But Lau so shallowly sketches her characters that it's hard to tell if these women are to be respected for choosing to submit, or pitied for occupying a position in a patriarchal hierarchy that forces them to become prostitutes and sex slaves. The idea that we must accept whatever happens between consenting adults is difficult to buy when one of those adults is at a financial, emotional, psychological, and historical disadvantage, and Lau's facile approach makes it impossible to determine how we're meant to interpret the often revolting action. Drags on too long, despite the volume's slimness.
Pub Date: March 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6058-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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