Told in the voices of its own characters turn by turn, a stirring if somewhat artificially rendered ``lyrical'' second novel by Benedict (A World Like This, 1990), a Columbia journalism professor who's also written about the print media's handling of sex crimes (Virgin and Vamp, 1992). When Bianca D°az, a poor, lonely 14-year-old girl on Manhattan's Upper Westside, begins to abuse her newborn baby, the girl's 40-year-old mother secretly arranges for a middle-class white woman to remove and adopt the infant. That's when emotional and legal hell breaks loose for all three women. Teresa Rivera, Bianca's widowed mother, is a Dominican-American immigrant who cleans subway cars for a living and has helplessly watched her older children's lives crumble in the neighborhood's twin lures and dangers of violence and drugs. Now, Teresa is determined to help her pretty, academically smart but troubled youngest child avoid a dead-end life, and also to protect Bianca's baby from the mysterious falls and bruises she's lately been showing the marks of whenever Bianca takes care of her. But what to do? In steps Sarah Goldin, a reporter investigating Teresa's crooked slumlord—Sarah is childless, well-married, rich by ghetto standards, and is soon beguiled by Teresa and the sweetness of the baby into becoming an adoptive mother. Young Bianca, though, acting under the influence of a likable local Guardian-Angel type named Roberto, sets out to win the baby back, and the result is a court battle ending with profound grief on the part of all: Although Sarah gets the baby, she loses her beautiful home and her husband; Bianca gets a second chance, but in a life now acridly flavored with self-knowledge; and Teresa gets the admiration of the reader—after almost losing everything she loves. Ambitious and often insighful, but with the feeling of being too sparsely populated—its characters being asked to have, and comment on, perceptions not convincingly natural to them. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: March 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94100-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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 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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