“It’s not as simple as they make it on TV,” says Freddy. Says the reader, oh, dear, but yes it is.
Veteran Barthelme (stories: The Law of Averages, 2000, etc.) sets a semi-successful professor to wondering about the meaning of life—and the reader can actually take him seriously now and then.
How is it, ponders narrator Elroy, that a person’s life turns out as it does—so that “you have this, suddenly and startlingly not at all what you sought.” The answer is—well, you get older. Elroy, an artist until he got bored with the effort and repetitiveness of it, has been for years an art professor at a college in Biloxi—where he thinks mainly about his female students: the youth, allure, and mystery of them. His regrets at not having taken his sexual opportunities may have something to do with the decision he and his wife Clare make at story’s opening to “get some space into the marriage, some room to maneuver.” Elroy takes an apartment with a view of the water—and finds himself involved with student-aged kids: his own stepdaughter Winter, her racy female friend Freddy, the talented but troubled art student Edward Works (who’ll die), and Winter’s seeming lover, the curious Victor. Things wander as Elroy ponders his life and the unfulfilling world around him, fixates on the sexy Freddy, gets fellated by her in his college office, and . . . ? To fill book’s middle, there’s a pointless car trip to Memphis and Dallas taken by Elroy, Freddy, Winter, and Victor, with overnights, an Elroy/Freddy consummation, a hackneyed stick-up in a roadside stop-n-go, and a homecoming in Biloxi where wife Clare is troubled by the Elroy-Freddy consummation. The whole is accompanied by ultra-tough-talk (“It’s not a hard ass thing, it’s just shit happens. I mean, people say this stuff about it, but it passes”), and, after some quite lovely nostalgia-riffs by Elroy as he remembers his childhood, he finds himself gravitating back toward Clare.
“It’s not as simple as they make it on TV,” says Freddy. Says the reader, oh, dear, but yes it is.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-218-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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