Trite, plotless, self-absorbed debut from a former writer of Seventeen’s advice column.
Good advice, bad advice.
Columnist Rosalie Preston tries to say the right things to the confused teenagers who write her at Girl Talk, though she’s not sure she’s qualified to give anyone advice: she just sort of stumbled into the job after temping for the magazine and her own life isn’t exactly stable. Which is to say that, at 26, she actually doesn’t have a real boyfriend or, um, particular goals or anything. But what’s real and what’s fake, anyway? Who knows? Rosalie does feel kind of real on stage sometimes, though—and when she’s not pretending to work, she does acting with the First Born theater company, along with rich girls, gay guys, and the merely eccentric who are all pretty different from the solid, middle-class types she grew up among. There’s Bella Starker, daughter of the billionaire who underwrites most of First Born’s expenses (Bella takes cabs and stuff). And Cam and Evan—they’re, like, interesting. And there’s Grace and, um, some others. Wow. . . is Berglan Starker, Bella’s much-married, excessively well-groomed father, coming on to her? Well, chalk it up to experience—albeit not one she can share with her dopey readers or concerned parents—but Rosalie is happy enough to bend over and give all for Berglan. He makes strange old-person pronouncements in an attempt to be polite, which is pretty much lost on Rosalie. Plus, ee-yeww—he has gray hair on his chest. How weird is that? But whatever, she gets to look at a really fabulous view of New York from his fabulous apartment while he’s banging away. Then a new love interest arrives on the scene: Declan Pearse, rugged Irish playwright. Should she bag Berglan and decide on Declan? What will her friends think (or do they think?)? Hey, doesn’t everything kind of turn out the same no matter what you do?
Trite, plotless, self-absorbed debut from a former writer of Seventeen’s advice column.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05170-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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