by Gore Vidal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2000
A beguiling conclusion to an invaluable extended work. If Vidal's novels were used as texts, we'd all be American History...
Though its narrative temperature remains dangerously low, entertainment value is dependably high in this seventh and last of Vidal's delectable Novels of Empire.
The Golden Age follows chronologically Washington, D.C. (1968), and is also closely related to Vidal's Empire, Hollywood, and even (his best novel) Burr. It begins in 1939, when fears of inevitable American involvement in another European war increase the likelihood that incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt's "amoral mastery of world politics" will guarantee him an unprecedented third term. Vidal then summarizes (often rather tediously) the watershed domestic and international political events of the subsequent 15 years, as observed and discussed by a colorful gallery of interconnected fictional characters and historical figures. Former film actress and newspaper publisher Caroline Sanford (Vidal's Clare Booth Luce) manipulates the levels of power (and the several men still under her spell) expertly. FDR charms and deceives all who wander within his orbit. His successor, Harry Truman, shows the steel beneath his unprepossessing exterior. And Caroline's nephew Peter Sanford bridges the worlds of Washington and Hollywood his aunt had conquered, as founder and co-editor of the liberal magazine The American Idea. Prominent cameo appearances are made by such luminaries as FDR's nonpareil advisor Harry Hopkins, William Randolph Hearst, the young Gore Vidal (already, in his 20s, a Washington insider), an imposingly resourceful Eleanor Roosevelt, and underrated novelist Dawn Powell (who memorably disses her rather better-known contemporary thus: "Ernest writes pidgin English, the way he thinks real men talk and write, consummate sissy that he is"). It's all very talky, and creaks and groans noticeably whenever Vidal makes labored connections to earlier books in the series. Still, the talk is wonderfully witty and informed—and climaxes magnificently in a surprise metafictional ending, which takes place on the recent final New Year's Eve of the past century.
A beguiling conclusion to an invaluable extended work. If Vidal's novels were used as texts, we'd all be American History majors.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-50075-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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