Cheerfully raunchy first novel by a former chef, with some memorable moments and authentic atmosphere.
If you can’t take the heat. . . .
But 28-year-old Layla Mitchner is not going to stay out of the kitchen. She didn’t blow most of her meager inheritance on courses at Le Cordon Bleu so some arrogant bastard who happens to think he’s the greatest chef in New York could force her to quit. Noel, the aforesaid arrogant bastard, keeps her making salads and vinaigrette while the men go on to bigger and better things. Trading dirty jokes with the Mexican underlings is one way to vent her frustration—they barely understand what she’s saying anyway. Does anyone but her notice that the new guy on the sauté station is high on coke? Of course not. Danny O’Shaughnessy is a man, so he can do no wrong—even if he is an ex-con and a complete incompetent. Layla seethes. What do you mean, her ice-cream balls aren’t tight enough? Take this scoop and shove it, bozo. A walk in the night air cools her off and reminds her why she can’t afford to quit. For one thing, she owes rent to her roommate. Her mother, a self-absorbed soap-opera actress, would help, but Layla would rather tough it out. Then Billy, her fey, gay sidekick (a great admirer of her mother’s campy histrionics), calls to invite her to a party. There, she meets Dick Davenport, a rich, self-absorbed hottie who thinks he’s all that plus a bag of blue-chip stocks. Billy points out tactfully that perhaps all Layla needs is a good lay, but she’s not sure she buys that. What about love? Finding a soulmate in Manhattan, though, is obviously impossible, and anyway, who the hell would want an underpaid, overworked, irritable female who arranges mesclun for a living? This guy Frank, a musician/promoter type, looks like a better bet than the too-perfect Dick—until Frank whips out handcuffs in a seedy motel.
Cheerfully raunchy first novel by a former chef, with some memorable moments and authentic atmosphere.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6042-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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 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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