Wagman (Magic Man, Magic Man, 1975, etc.) returns after almost 18 years to limn—in excruciatingly pretentious prose—the midlife crisis of an aging American Princess. As 40-ish Peachy Marvel, having dropped off daughter Ruthie at Harvard for her freshman year, walks down Brattle Street, she notices for the first time that she's become ``invisible.'' Men no longer look at the woman ``who used to make heads spin when [she'd] mosey down any street in Philadelphia''—which is enough of an observation to provoke the crisis that, admittedly, has been brewing for a while but now emerges in full spate. Peachy proceeds to record the fluctuations of this crisis that, begun on Brattle Street, continues in a bookshop where she meets the great writer Manuel Zot; gets into high gear on the Massachusetts Turnpike; and finally peaks at a niece's wedding in suburban Philadelphia. There, Peachy finds happiness, understanding, and a lot of other good things. In addition to the crisis reportage, there's a frenetic monologue—embellished with quotes from Pascal, Flaubert, and other fashionable intellectuals—in which Peachy tells the story of her life: A happy childhood as the adored daughter of her physician father is followed by an uneasy adolescence when her father is less loving; Peachy's voluble mother begins to plot marriage; and Peachy is expelled from high school for a reason so implausible that it can only be to facilitate the next step in her life—marriage at 18 to Alfred. A prosperous fur-broker, Alfred gives his young wife everything she wants; but when the couple's baby is killed in an accident, for which Peachy feels responsible, the two drift apart and Alfred leaves for another woman. But Peachy, bad memories finally exorcised, can now ``forgive so that you can go on loving,'' and move forward. Poor Peachy, poor us, who must endure her pretensions to humor, brilliance, and sympathy. More a lemon than a peach.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1993
ISBN: 0-939149-72-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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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