British writer-journalist White (Mothertime, 1994, etc.), who soldiers in the Fay Weldon school of domestic satire, returns—this time to use a surrogate-motherhood scam as a lens through which to explore the complex nature of family ties. Seventeen-year-old Brenda takes shorthand at 150 words a minute, but her looks broadcast her lower-class origins: She has tea stains on her work clothes and ``chips-and-vinegar skin under bright orange No 7 makeup.'' Certainly she doesn't hold a candle to Jessica, her impeccably coiffed boss, who rushes home from a hard day at the office to whip up a dinner of young pigeons in red wine. But chance makes Jessica deign to focus on her untidy secretary: Brenda is accidentally pregnant and Jessica wants a baby. Worn out from a long bout of infertility treatments with her younger boyfriend, Rudi, Jessica fears that he'll leave her because he so badly wants a child. So she concocts a scheme to have Rudi make love, under her supervision, to barely pregnant Brenda, and then, believing that the ensuing child is his, adopt it with Jessica. (Brenda will get a tidy sum for her efforts.) And all goes sort of according to plan—except that a wild turn of events installs Brenda's boisterous, Elvis-singing family in the house next door to Jessica, leading to all sorts of noisy interfamilial merging. When they discover that Brenda is expecting with Rudi, the mom, dad, and lunkish brothers invite themselves over for celebratory visits and travel en masse to the hospital for the delivery. Jessica does get her man, but in the process she gains an unrepentantly tacky new family, and the carefully constructed graciousness of her life will never be the same. White weaves earnest but perceptive asides about control, class, and solidarity among women into her heavy-handed satire: The result is a tasty snack that goes down as easily as fast food but actually packs some nutritive wallop.
Pub Date: April 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-85797-561-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Orion/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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