An unfocused, underdeveloped, unexciting debut.
Old money, environmental activism and large waterfowl collide in the suburbs of Boston.
Wild geese have descended on Eden Rock Country Club, and they’ve excited a discordant array of reactions. The club manager wants them gone, dead or alive. The club chef wants them fat and juicy in time for a big awards banquet. The groundskeeper wants to protect them from poisonous herbicides; he’s adopted a gosling for a pet. And one of the club’s members has descended into an existential funk after accidentally killing one of the birds with a golf ball. Meanwhile, the Eden Rock social scene is just recovering from a broken engagement between two young members, Nina Rundlett and Eliot Farnsworth. Their breakup was engineered by Arietta Wingate, keeper of “the book”: a record of the club’s sexual history, secretly maintained since Eden Rock’s inception and passed down through the generations from one club matriarch to her carefully chosen apprentice. Arietta knows who the real fathers are, and it’s her job to prevent intra-club marriages between partners unaware of their consanguinity. These two plotlines make very odd bedfellows. The plague of geese could have triggered a slapstick romp or a sharp satire. It could have been a black comedy of manners. But it’s neither, and lacks both fizz and bite. Nor does Hart create some other satisfying whole from these disparate pieces. The large cast of characters adds diversity without adding interest. Hart narrates in the third person, but she allows individual voices to color each chapter’s tone, a technique that would have been more successful if her characters weren’t uniformly one-dimensional. Club manager Gerard has no existence beyond Eden Rock; chef Vita thinks of nothing but foie gras and crème fraîche; activist Phoebe seldom spares a thought for anything she can’t protest. They may not be unrealistic—people can, of course, be overworked, food-obsessed and shrilly judgmental—but they certainly are boring.
An unfocused, underdeveloped, unexciting debut.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-01500-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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