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NICE

How does a nice girl find love in Manhattan? Grace tries by murdering all the undesirable men she comes across in this, Sacks’s first novel—an offbeat comedy on the complications of modern dating rites. Grace is a “nice” girl—and therein lies her problem. She just can’t bear to hurt men’s feelings (say, at that crucial moment when they reach for some sexual intimacy), so instead of letting them down gently she finds it far easier to smother them with a pillow or push them into the Hudson. Feeling justified and completely remorseless, Grace meanwhile continues her busy life as a journalist for a political magazine. But unbeknownst to her, Sam has been watching her all along (the story is told in alternating narratives, Grace’s and Sam’s). A Russian assassin now in private practice since the end of the Cold War, Sam first spots Grace while randomly testing some new eavesdropping equipment in a bar she frequents. Strangely intrigued, he follows her and her unlucky date home, witnessing her subsequent disposal of the body; and when he watches number two hit the river, he knows he has found his soulmate. Date number three exhibits a violent streak, leading Grace to another (though more justifiable) murder. Sam gallantly gets rid of the body for her, his way of introduction, and the two begin an edgy romance, despite Sam’s fear that Grace may be turning into a serial killer and her secret worry that she’ll have to him if he becomes too fond of her. Added to the complicated relationship is Sam’s new-found respect for life—paid hits lack the excitement they once aroused. Will this couple end up killing each other? Will they find consummate happiness? Sacks’s slim story offers few real surprises, though it manages to pull its own weight with droll humor and surprisingly sympathetic characters. An entertaining (if narrow-in-scope) take on women who just can’t say no.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-312-19306-8

Page Count: 208

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

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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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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