A repetitive, implausible, and strangely narrated tale of four men and the effects a favorite high-school teacher has on their later lives. It's 1961, and a few high-school juniors—talented singer Henry, orphaned German immigrant Rupert, proper Malcolm, and writer Kip—are inexplicably chosen for special after-school tutorials with Mrs. Anna Aylmer. Though she's the school's Spanish teacher, Anna tutors the boys in literature, language, and feeling. The story is narrated in the first person by one of the boys (we never know which one), now grown to middle age, who rhapsodizes over the short time the students spent with Anna before her death in a car accident. There's an abundance of repetitious testimony to her enchantment (``No one else in our upbringing had presented study as quite such an ever-expanding field, finally boundless, no end to what we might find there''), but the obsessional attachment the four display has little weight, since we're only told of the existence of the obsession, not its origin. Twenty or so years later, the four are vacationing on a Caribbean island, reminiscing about Anna, tracing the path of their still connected lives (all the men are gay) and calling her spirit to them with the Caribbean tradition of the jumbie—a ceremonial banquet for the ghost of the dead. The second half of the story is narrated by the ghost of Anna, who's been summoned by their memories as she—in a hook ending—elucidates her own connection with the boys. Strong (Offspring, 1995, etc.) struggles to give resonance and purpose to the tale, but the overly sensitive and sophisticated dialogue of the adolescent boys and their peculiar—and not really understandably grounded—fixation tend to defeat his efforts.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-944072-81-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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