An endearing, if protracted, novel of self-discovery.
Smith tells the story of a gay man’s tumultuous search for love in this erotic debut novel.
Wilson James doesn’t have much guidance while growing up in a dysfunctional African-American family in Los Angeles. His parents are split up: his father is a distant alcoholic and his mother is a woman given easily to fits of rage. Wilson can’t go to them with his everyday problems, let alone his secret, blossoming attraction to men. After an eye-opening tryst at age 13 with his father’s 24-year-old cousin, Wilson becomes certain that the love he needs can only come from other males—specifically, grown men with the experience to guide him through the unknown territory of pleasure. So begins his search for satisfaction, although his youth and vulnerability often place him in situations in which older men are able to take advantage of him in ways he doesn’t always understand. As Wilson learns to navigate adulthood, his quest for affection becomes a journey of personal growth in which he seeks to lay to rest the ghosts of his childhood and find a way to engender love—not only in the hearts of others, but also in himself. Smith is a sensual writer, executing every scene in lusty, baroque prose. Unfortunately, this lyricism often leads to overwrought passages that confuse rather than elucidate: “Fragile by circumstance, I was a slave to poignant inclusiveness, and my innocence preyed upon by trusted foes, as a naïve participant sworn into darkened territory.” Wilson and his primary love interests are well-drawn, and Smith teases out enough emotional investment to carry readers through to the end. That said, the novel would have benefited from a bit more compression; its 467 pages might have been stronger at a lean 300. On the whole, however, there’s a charm to Wilson’s voice and journey, his ability to find high drama in the commonplace, and his attempts to wring beauty from often grim (and sometimes grimy) surroundings.
An endearing, if protracted, novel of self-discovery.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5089-0788-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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