A bruising, punishing read: not to be missed.
Two lovers seemingly meant for each other plunge into a hellfire of contention, recrimination, and grief in Eberstadt’s unsparing fourth novel (after When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, 1997).
She’s overachieving Gwen Lewis, who works for a privately funded human rights organization offering redevelopment aid throughout the former Soviet Union. He’s Gideon Wolkowitz, an anarchic puppeteer and street theater performer whose merry band (Pants on Fire) is devoted to sabotaging NYC Mayor Giuliani’s policy of selling publicly owned buildings to corporations. Accidentally meeting both at home and abroad, Gwen and Gideon instantly, ecstatically connect: their mutual sexual hunger recognizes no boundaries, and when Gwen finds herself unexpectedly, inconveniently pregnant, they bravely rearrange priorities, and marry. Then the furies begin to descend. In a densely allusive, insistently metaphoric prose style (somewhat akin to Hortense Calisher’s), Eberstadt brilliantly employs a form of hectoring direct address to both her protagonists, concentrating with—well, furious intensity on Gwen’s panicky realization that the imperatives of childrearing may forever estrange her from her chosen life, and on Gideon’s constant need (shaped by a loveless itinerant childhood and youth) for validation and security. He loses himself in “work” scorned by Gwen’s upscale family and friends. She doggedly juggles care of infant daughter Bella with the career that’s slowly slipping away from her. Both parents are caught in “the trap of love-gone-wrong: you withdraw your love, and your lover, feeling unloved, acts only the more unlovable . . . . ” The noose never relaxes: a horrific shock climax seems to promise the freedom each demands of the other, but brings only further compromise and captivity. This essentially unoriginal plot gains great depth from two exhaustively penetrating characterizations and from Eberstadt’s virtual genius for ironically precise summary statement (“The earth is the Lord’s, but the abominations that you commit on it are your own,” etc.).
A bruising, punishing read: not to be missed.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41256-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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