The late British reviewer and novelist Neville debuts here with a lightly amusing, sweetly romantic remembrance of radical things past: Paris in May 1968, the heady, riotous days when revolution was in the air. As Parisian streets erupt and tear gas wafts day and night through the air, a vastly tangled love affair unfolds, with all participants having one thing in common: gonorrhea. Polly, a political naif from rural England pursuing a bohemian life in the Latin Quarter, meets Giorgio, a filthy, dark-eyed Italian anarchist taking a course at the Sorbonne and wanted by the authorities for deportation. He gives Polly the clap, which she soon spreads to her upper-class ex-lover and boss when he comes over from London for an afternoon quickie—and who in turn infects his aristocratic wife. Giorgio then reconciles briefly with his ex, also from London, who passes his love germ on to her longtime friend and fellow radical Gottlieb, an American on the lam, giving it to him on the one occasion when their friendship turns physical. As if this weren—t enough, Polly’s friend Jane, berated by her husband for affairs she never had, finally accepts an offer from a randy student who had already encountered one of Giorgio’s other lovers, thereby bringing his disease into yet another home and ending Jane’s marriage. This lusty circle of friends, however, for whom fighting the good fight means not just street activity and sheltering Paris’s most wanted but regular trips to the doctor as well, is also visited by true love’s first stirrings: Jane finds quiet happiness, while Polly and Giorgio suffer a stormy romance through which they remain firmly attracted to each other. Tongue-in-cheek turns fill this swift, buoyant little tale of the past whose innocence is almost its undoing, the sexual revolution having since then foundered on a shoal much more savage than the clap.
Pub Date: May 21, 1998
ISBN: 1-85984-285-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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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