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ATHENA

Ireland's Banville (Ghosts, 1993, etc.) is deservedly known as an inventive stylist and erudite novelist. His plots, though, and — as in this case — his language sometimes relish ambiguity and richness over the simpler pull of narrative. Banville introduces us to Morrow, a clerkish, middle-age type straight out of T.S. Eliot or Magritte. Encumbered with a chain-smoking, dying aunt and a considerable talent for wallowing in his own funks — and in his own troubled past — Morrow falls in with a band of Irish gangsters who want him to verify the authenticity of a cache of paintings. Whether the paintings (all seem to be valuable works by legendary Italian and Dutch masters) are hot is anybody's guess, since Morrow, during the course of his examination of the pieces, seems capable only of frothing over them while associating their subject matter with his new girlfriend, a woman identified only as "A." This name, cribbed from Kafka and Hawthorne, could be the sort of thing, paired with the unrelenting exploitation of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy, that makes you lose patience with Banville's book. But he keeps you hooked, partly with his luminous writing, partly by allowing a scrumptious lowlife character to slope onstage at just the right moment. Morrow's involvement with A. develops an increasingly kinky edge, featuring mild S&M and lurid spectatorship, as does Banville's attitude itself toward his sad-sack incompetent. Even so, what fascinates about this fairly vicious and quite lovely novel is Banville's combination of contempt and affection for Morrow's type: those who, if it weren't for art, would probably rather not exist, but soldier on anyway in the service of their delicate passions. The foolhardy aesthete as hero? Why not? Even if Banville's precious prose may make you pull your hair out in hanks, there's no disputing his claim to this unique fictional territory.

Pub Date: May 9, 1995

ISBN: 0-679-40521-6

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995

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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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