British writer Hucker's becoming a master at exploring the psyche of the independent-minded woman (A Dangerous Happiness, 1996, etc.)—and her examination here of the complex nature of female friendships produces yet another angle on the subject. Middle-aged, red-haired Polly Ferrison's friends think that she has the perfect life: two bright, attractive daughters, a challenging, satisfying job as a high-school history teacher, and a loving husband, Neville. But as it turns out, of course, appearances lie: Neville is actually a selfish, demanding, greedy, adulterous creep who's been conducting a sporadic 20-year fling with one of Polly's supposed best friends, Vanessa. Worse, he's in love with another woman (now pregnant by him), whom he wants to marry. A breakup with Polly is inevitable. When her four best friends from college—the vampy Vanessa, wealthy Candida, farmwife Mary, and career-woman Jane—hear the news, they're sympathetic (except for Vanessa, who's enraged that Neville hasn't chosen her), but they've all got troubles of their own: Candida married for money and is now in love with another man; Mary has a husband and children of her own, but Vanessa relies on her so much that it's almost as if she has another extra-needy charge. And driven Jane has finally met the man of her dreams, but she'll have to give up her career and move to Poland if she wants to stay together with him. At the story's opening, the surfaces of these women's lives haven't yet cracked, but circumstances soon plunge all four into a turmoil that teaches them, to varying degrees, that sometimes friendship is the only thing you can count on. The larger point, however, is that the modern woman has enough options, so that any choices she makes can be the right ones—if she believes in her own self-worth. A slight but ultimately satisfying read, less syrupy than much of this genre.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-17051-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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