A shrink convinces herself that one of her patients is her lost daughter: the strong premise has a weak follow-through in Homes's first novel for adults (after her YA novel Jack, 1989, and her 1990 story collection, The Safety of Objects). When Claire Roth was in college, she became pregnant by her English professor. Dead-set against a back-alley abortion (this was 1966) and getting no sympathy from her ice-cold WASP parents, Claire was forced to give up her baby for adoption (by a Jewish family, she insisted). Now 43, a successful Manhattan therapist with a good marriage and two sons, she is still haunted by that early loss, still self-punishing. Her newest patient is Jody Goodman (whose viewpoint alternates with Claire's). The outwardly self-confident Jody, who works for a film producer, is getting the jitters over her imminent departure for UCLA's film school. Despite a wonderfully helpful mother, Jody has always had problems making changes and getting close to people. Is this related to her adoption? When Claire first sees the possibility that Jody is her daughter (times and places jibe), the therapist considers her own violent reaction as a countertransference problem; but then Claire starts behaving unprofessionally, fawning over Jody while neglecting her own family. After this tension, there is a falling- off. Jody leaves for California, escorted by her mother, and the only way Homes can reconnect her protagonists is to have Jody fly back east with a Mysterious Virus, while Claire is spinning her wheels. The climax is effectively ghoulish but resolves nothing. Snappy dialogue, transparently clear style, and characters handled with just the right amounts of sympathy and acerbity: Homes has a bright future—but, for now, readers have this intriguing if ultimately disappointing debut.
Pub Date: May 6, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41568-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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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