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ST. FAMOUS

A well-timed and masterful sendup of celebrity, racism, and the justice system in America, by the esteemed author of The Liberty Campaign (1993), etc. Paul Soloway is a man behind his time: Passionate about literature, unfamiliar with the modern art of compromise, the Columbia graduate settles down on Manhattan's Upper West Side to commit his life to great books. Aiding and abetting is his hard- working wife, Renata, who maintains a full-time job and gives birth to two boys while Paul labors on his first novel—doing so for a decade as the Soloways grow ever poorer and more depressed. But all changes the day a local court case inspires a race riot, and Paul, through a misunderstanding, is beaten and kidnapped by a group of young black men. It's only a day or so before the police rescue Paul, but to his surprise he emerges from the hospital a hero, with Hollywood and the New York publishing world banging on his door. Though he's repelled by the idea of a best-selling true-crime account while his ``real'' work languishes in a drawer, Paul's impoverished family persuade him to make a profitable publishing deal. Little does he know that his surviving kidnapper, Victor Hartley, is also entertaining visits from TV-movie moguls—and from a celebrity lawyer intent on making him the hero of the story. Grasping at his new celebrity as a way out of prison, and at the TV-movie deals as a way out of the ghetto, Victor is desperate to make his voice heard over Paul's. Out on probation, he commits a desperate act that seals his fate—while Paul, the quintessential oblivious white guy, innocently reaps the rewards. A hasty conclusion outlining the amicable dissolution of Paul's marriage and Victor's unfair sentencing proves disappointing after a setup this fascinating. Still, the author has much to say about life and art. (Author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-385-47459-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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