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CHARACTERS ON THE LOOSE

STORIES

Fifteen pieces from a veteran writer (The Body in Four Parts, 1993; Obscene Gestures for Women, 1989, etc.) that only sometimes get under the skin or into the heart. Kauffman gathers up symbols in a half-casual way so that they seem—whether they really do or not—to reverberate on a single theme. In ``Nightmares for Everybody,'' for example, two apparently gay boys and two adults watch a meteor shower—and one boy reveals that his unstable mother has written to him in her own menstrual blood. The same chance conjunction occurs in ``Girl Games,'' about one woman driving another into Detroit to visit her lover; the driver goes to read on the river front (``The words look like live things. . . . And put together, some of them even make sense''), where she has a Salinger-esque conversation with a little girl. Kauffman's seemingly effortless writerly skills are everywhere apparent, whether in sketches like ``The Ocean with Everything In It'' (a young man becomes obsessed with death), modernist exercises like ``Signed Away'' (surreal, Barthelme-inspired pages portray Emily Dickinson as a modern-day biker), or equally amusing group portraits like ``Baku's Theory'' (an ``immigrant support group'' is formed on the theory that ``It takes fifteen years to know where you are, and to know if it makes sense to be there''). At book's center is ``26 Acts in 26 Letters,'' a wildly inventive but exercise-bookish description of the sex lives of the alphabet (``At work, M's panties are streaked and sticky; N carries the Free Press with him to cover his erection''). Other love stories follow, as do more couples and more characters, including the eccentric Eureka of ``Eureka in Toledo, Weather Permitting,'' of whom the narrator says, arguably apropos of Kauffman, that ``She lurched through words, fell back, picked up a story somewhere else. She wasn't incoherent, but freewheeling, I would say.'' Skilled wordsmithing that's often brilliant, less often moving, and too often dusty in spite of itself.

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 1-55597-252-7

Page Count: 142

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

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