Poet Hoffman's fictional debut: a doomed romance, set in the New York art and literary worlds, whose players are inspired and silly, courageous and maudlin by turns. Joy is a poet who can count among her blessings a growing professional reputation, a prestigious teaching job, a supportive philosophy-professor husband, a beautiful New York apartment and a perfect set of children. Yet she has never known happiness—not, that is, until the failed seduction of her husband's boss propels her into a vanity-soothing affair with famous artist Carl Vaggio. Sex with Vaggio, a self-satisfied eccentric with a host of female admirers and several missing front teeth, provides the necessary sadomasochistic buzz to make Joy come alive; and compared to the affair, the rest of her life—the gratifying career, the beautiful children, the marriage to what she suspects is her ``womanly'' husband—doesn't count for much. A sexually abusive grandfather, ambitious and unhappy mother, and passive father are trotted out as reasons why Joy becomes obsessed with such an utterly self-centered lover, but her own lust for drama plays a major role as well. As Joy's parents divorce, her best friend (another of Carl's lovers) dies of cancer, and her mother begins to lose her mind, Joy retreats to London to write a book about them all—then claims that her career is ruined when one player in the roman Ö clef threatens to sue on publication. Joy consoles herself by abandoning her teaching, divorcing her husband, and ignoring her children for the sake of Vaggio, who absent-mindedly continues to reject her—until she wakes up at last to find herself middle-aged but finally empty of passion for the artist (now a tiny old man) who took everything and gave her nothing. A sad first novel whose heroine swings trapeze-like between braggadocio and despair—steeped in sharp, sexy, ethereal, sometimes even funny prose.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79518-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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