A second from DeFilippi has parallels with his considerably stronger Blood Sugar (1992), but too much in plot flies off with too little in substantive atmosphere or theme to act as ballast. Narrator Jay Tasti opens up with a ramble through plentifully familiar boyhood memories of growing up on Duck Alley, Long Island. Recalling the happy summertime of his youth in the “50s, Tasti summons Coke bottles, friendly drunks, fussy moms, baseball games on the radio and harmless pranks. Back then, see, Tasti was real tight with Albert Niklozak, and, man, did they do some crazy stuff. Well. Then comes the draft. Albert gets sent to Nam (and strangely never speaks of it), while Tasti stays comfy with a stateside role. Tasti muffles his mixed feelings, becomes a high-school teacher, and marries. Albert becomes a small-time hood dealing in fenced goods and prostitutes. As for his life in education, Tasti recalls, oh, if there only hadn’t been Arlynn Svenson . . . . Arlynn, the cartoonishly drawn high-school sex siren with a troubled mind, finds teacher Tasti on the beach during a field trip, bares her breasts to him, and actually says “jiggle, jiggle.” Though Tasti takes a hundred pages to not touch her breasts, Arlynn, while literally flopping around in the hall and driving everyone nuts, claims Tasti got her pregnant. Blow her off? Advise therapy? Nah, do the sensible thing, and get Albert to silence her. It seems Albert does what he’s asked, gets caught, sent to jail, then killed in a knife fight. Only after all that does Tasti discover that Albert never murdered the girl—but held his tongue for the honor of friendship, which Tasti grieves to have forgotten. The depth of Tasti’s spiritual agony is doubtless meant to be profound, but the story just doesn—t make it real, with the result that the profound and the inane are at loggerheads.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57962-024-8
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
