In his fifth novel, Wolff (The Final Club, 1990, etc.) deftly mixes a detective-like investigation with rites of passage longueurs to unmask a contemporary serpent in an equally contemporary paradise. When 15-year-old Maisie Jenks deliberately dives headfirst from a high cliff on July 4, her family, especially younger brother Ted, and their entire utopian community are never the same again. Ted begins an investigation that moves from the past to the present as he tries to understand just why his sister did what she did. Maisie and Ted are the children of Ann and Jinx, affluent products of the early 1970s who were persuaded by Jinx's charismatic college roommate, Doc Halliday, to invest in a decaying upstate New York camp. Under Halliday's leadership the camp becomes the Blackberry Mountain community, where the houses are aesthetically and environmentally sensitive, and life is fun, ``a series of topping acts.'' Like so many others, Ted adores the gifted Halliday, who ``was brave, hot to climb a roof or a tree, take a kayak over the falls....No bluster just resolve and zip.'' Ted recalls how Maisie, known for her courage and iconoclasm, finally recovers from her fall yet is irrevocably changed (``she cannot abide recollection, especially the habit of recollection''); how idyllic his boyhood seemed despite the underlying tensions; how his parents' marriage broke down; and how the community itself changed. An incestuous episode is suggestive, but not until Ted himself is an adult teaching in a local school does he understand what really happened. A student essay plagiarizing Lolita provides the essential clue, not only to Maisie, but to his parents' divorce as well, and a heartsick Ted ensures that justice is done, even if it means a fatal betrayal. Except for the sluggish mid-section that recalls the past too lengthily and lovingly, an absorbing tale of monstrous evil with an all too human face. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-40638-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
