A yearlong dalliance between an artistic young woman and a remote, powerful, married businessman, which, though never sexually consummated, becomes the girl's primary obsession—in a gifted young writer's first novel (but third sex-saturated, half- successful book: the story collection Fresh Girls and a memoir, Runaway, both 1995). Fiona, 24, meets Raymond, 49, one rain-soaked night at a black-tie arts-award reception in a city native to neither of them. The two exchange only a few words, but the next day Fiona catches a glimpse of Raymond from her taxi; she jumps out and, when he beckons to her, follows him through the revolving doors of his hotel. So begins a year of guilt-racked nibbling at Fiona's body parts for Raymond, and for Fiona a love fixation that remains weirdly abstract but, she tells us repeatedly, is all-consuming. The two meet in hotel rooms in various cities another half-dozen times before Raymond (``I love my wife'') calls off the affair abruptly and completely; meanwhile, Fiona thinks constantly of him (``the first man for whom she had felt this confusion of desire'') and fantasizes that she'll win him back. Her fantasies include one in which Raymond's wife is humiliated and raped in a parking garage, another in which she inhabits the wife's body while Raymond and the wife make love. She also hallucinates Raymond's face and presence everywhere, except when she's remembering emotionless snippets from her teenage years (such as having sex with a friend's father). The atmosphere of the novel is pathological precisely because Fiona's proclaimed emotionality is inscrutable and invisible to the reader; in sometimes elegant and sometimes windy prose, Lau watches Fiona wandering around, self-absorbed and narcissistic, and forgets that readers require plot and character development in addition to tragic poses. Neither is here, unfortunately. In the end, a slight book from a still-promising writer.
Pub Date: May 9, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82457-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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 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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