A British first novel, an overripe plum of nostalgia and romance set in WW II England, that's something of a novelty item, containing as it does several wartime recipes that are fun to peruse, a bit tricky to carry out. Belle Morton, childless and disillusioned with marriage, decides to buy a lace-glove tea-restaurant and transform it into the ``Victory Cafe,'' where good food may be had even in wartime. It's a wizard success (British slang of the period abounds) and counts among its employees: mean Connie, who does the Victory out of deserved honors; young Wyn; and Wyn's best friend, Dorrie, she of the lovely singing voice and the awful parents of severe religious convictions. Then love comes to Dorrie in the person of a black American serviceman by the name of Lucky, one of three buddies who are welcomed to the cafÇ in spite of threats from a lethal white-supremacist sergeant. Later, the three GIs are entertained by the cafÇ's perennial upstairs tenant, Mrs. Renee Oblonsky, nicknamed ``Prin''; Dorrie launches a singing career; Lucky is killed, thanks to vicious persecution; and Dorrie discovers she's pregnant. It's Prin to the rescue—or is her solution the worst thing Prin could have done? And what of Belle with her Australian lover? Did she do what was right? At the close, in present time, there's a reunion between Belle and Dorrie, allowing the women to reconcile themselves with the past. The characters are elementary; the dialect at times lies heavy, heavy (From Lucky: ``Yer voice make me tremble when I hear it singin' in ma head''). As for the recipes: ``elderflowers'' may be a shade difficult to find, and items like ``national flour'' need research; but the names are delightful (``Shropshire Fidget Pie''?). Slight but harmless.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13954-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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