Beautiful young Englishwomen and the men who disappoint them populate this tart and bitter debut collection by a former model and Vogue staff writer living in London—winner of the Somerset Maugham Award. ``I lay on the bed looking over my shoulder through a tangle of hair, across my dipping breast down to thighs like swan's wings. I felt electric and wanted him to look at me. But he slept within seconds.'' Much is expected of the men in Simpson's stories and next to nothing is received as a succession of young women living in both ancient and modern England fume over their martyrdom at the hands of love. In ``Zoe and the Pedagogues,'' a self-effacing student sullenly tolerates her professor lover's habit of treating her as a kind of pet; in ``The Bed,'' a depressed secretary risks enraging her drab young cohabiter by buying a magnificent new bed; in ``Good Friday, 1663,'' a 17th-century teenager dissects the hateful qualities of her new, much older husband while waiting to give birth to another man's child. In Simpson's world, sex is seen as a despicable business transaction (``Are you sure your friend Jim values you at your true worth?'' a wealthy wife asks her younger neighbor in ``A Shining Example'' shortly before she makes a pass at her) or as a self-imposed form of solitary confinement (``I don't know what he thinks about,'' the narrator says of her husband in the title story. `' `If only he could talk,' as old people say of their pets''), and men can be counted on to lie, steal, disappear after a single night or, worse, remain to prove themselves unutterably dull. Pessimistic images (the vacationing heroine of ``The Seafarer'' unpacks her clothes into ``a wardrobe no bigger than a coffin'') and dreary settings accumulate until the fate of the final, quasi-Kafkaesque story's heroine—death by hanging—comes as absolutely no surprise. ``Don't be morbid,'' snaps the condemned woman's mother shortly before the book's abrupt conclusion. Sound advice, too late. Simpson's talent should improve with age.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-517-58508-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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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