The enthusiastic (if slightly sappy and overearnest) White joins a new movement of male African-American writers (e.g., Eric Jerome Dickey, among others) who want to portray ``good'' black men, rather than the more frequent media representations of gangstas and deadbeat dads. Kahlil Richardson, a handsome, educated, six-foot five-inch ``chocolate brother,'' with five sisters and a widowed mom, is an ad executive at Detroit's Houston Corporation by day, and a babe- magnet both by day and night. Kahlil finds his women, though, to be a constant source of tension and conflict. First, there's Cece, the supposed love of his life, whose distrustfulness and manipulative best friend interfere with what could be Kahlil's main chance for true romantic happiness. Then there's his best pal, Dewayna, with her fly-by-night husband, Demitrious, who continually neglects his responsibilities concerning their son Octavious. Not to mention Sonje, Kahlil's politically powerful and sexually voracious former lover, who won't let anything stand in the way of her own success, and, finally, his oldest sister Leandra, whose son Sid (Kahlil's nephew) is in tons of trouble and headed for more. It's Sid's gang associations that form the bulk of the dramatic action here. Due to Kahlil's work for the Urban Coalition, a grassroots organization that strives to ensure that the black community is adequately represented in the city of Detroit, he takes a particular interest in rescuing Sid from oncoming demise. As Kahlil deals with his demanding women, he releases stress by harping on about the ``suck- ass white boys'' in his office—and thereby falls into his own trap of stereotyping. Eventually, he realizes that life (surprise) is more complicated than he'd thought. Lively language and colorful characters, but the shifting point-of-view is confusing and the plot loose, at best.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84491-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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