Next book

THE ART OF TELLING

ESSAYS ON FICTION

Drawn from lectures delivered to literary critics, this collection is more deaconly and theoretical than Kermode's last book on the legitimacy of interpretation, The Genesis of Secrecy. But it unshirkingly continues—with admirable steadfastness and without reactive hysteria—a reasoned case for hermeneutics, for a literary criticism that doesn't (as the new French and Yale-ites seem to do) throw out the baby with the bath-water. Kermode will not apologize for the sharp eye he keeps peeled for "secrecy, an inexplicable consonance" in fictional narratives: "We know it is there because the disturbance in the prose signals its presence. It is so arranged that we . . .may ignore it if we choose; but it is there, and has to do with expansion, with the reconciliation of art with honorable rest." This persistence of secrecy in texts, says Kermode, puts the Derrida/Barthes mania fora reader-made or "lisable" text to some disadvantage; all novels, he stresses, share a "property of narrative: it accepts and exploits the pluralities that arise from their situations." As examples, he goes far and wide to analyze Ford's The Good Soldier, Conrad's Under Western Eyes, Green's Loving, even Arnold Bennett's Riceyman Steps and the English mystery Trent's Last Case—finding each of them faux-naif, more knowing and lisable than the French school would even begin to give them credit for. Generous, patient, strenuous Kermode defangs the New French criticism of its self-congratulatory novelty; he demonstrates that all stories, as far back as the Gospels, will mold to some deconstructionist demands—but disproves the idea that any work can be totally self-referential, free-playing, and "unmeaning." This middle ground of serious criticism has so far found its clearest, most wide-ranging advocate in Kermode; and his new book, though difficult and strictly academic, is an important one—ecumenical, level, acute—in its field.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1983

ISBN: 0674048296

Page Count: 244

Publisher: Harvard Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 32


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 32


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

Categories:
Close Quickview