Apart from the title piece itself, this collection of McPhee articles from The New Yorker doesn't really deliver full value. The most interesting, for its subject, is "The Atlantic Generating Station," about a prospective nuclear-power plant floating on an immense hull off the coast of New Jersey; prospectively, too, a magnet and threat to sea life. One man's inspiration that mushroomed, the project (since shelved) enlists the range of McPhee's sympathies and skills, and his peerless knack for signification. Then there's a disarming, if slightly arch, "Talk of the Town" tidbit, "The Pinball Philosophy," about two preeminent players, the Times' Tom Buckley and Pulitzer journalist J. Anthony Lukas ("who, between tilts, does some freelance writing"); there's a characteristic McPhee sortie into the wilds, with a characteristically ill-sorted, well-suited lot of super-woodsmen. And there's the notorious story of "Otto" the pseudonymous chef at an unnamed, out-of-the-way country restaurant who reportedly served McPhee the "twenty or thirty" best meals of his life—and whom New York food writers zealously tracked down and found wanting. (Worse, the usually-meticulous New Yorker had to apologize for an unwarranted slur to four-star restaurant Lutece.) The piece reads like a parody, with its testimonials to the "educated, sensitive, intelligent," dedicated, publicity-shunning proprietors, its 50 pages of magisterals pronouncements on microscopic food topics: a sendup, in short, of the whole self-important food scene. But apparently McPhee means this as seriously as he means us to take, for instance, canoeist John's appraisal of the St. John River ("some flavor of the upper Androscoggin . . . more presence than the Penobscot . . . you have reminiscences of it in the Delaware . . ."). Happily, though, there's also "Giving Good Weight," about New York's flourishing new Greenmarkets—where local farmers, an endangered species, sell fresh produce to deprived cityfolk in a heady atmosphere of banter and beefs, blaring Panasonics and instant friendships that McPhee scripts like a scene from a Robert Altman movie. A mixed bag, then, best in its larger reaches.
Pub Date: Nov. 26, 1979
ISBN: 0374516006
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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