A museum of a place and time that’s filled, however brightly, with trinkets.
Tel’s first novel (Arafat’s Elephant, stories, 2002) is a slight, poetic little thing that has its considerable charm but remains determinedly airy and unballasted.
When Freud escaped Vienna and settled in London, he was to die there the next year, in 1939, victim of cancer of the mouth. Tel’s story takes up that year or so in 26 alphabetic “chapters,” from “Apple” to “Zebra,” that describe prewar London, the neighborhood Freud lived in, and aspects of his daily life, mainly concerning his friendship with Ernest Jones, the great protégé of Freud’s who, in this telling, euthanizes the great man (though in real life, Jones wasn’t the one). The patient, indeed, had bouts of great pain, and he came to London already wearing an artificial palate—a device that, in one whimsical passage, jumps out of Freud’s mouth and flies around, chattering. Fancy can be powerful (and powerfully charming), but here it hints at a will-o’-the-wisp quality of the whole that keeps Tel’s little novel from drawing the strengths it seems to want from its subject. A light-toned treatment of Freud—at one point he sees a number of patients in a day: all are magically cured—is hardly taboo, but Tel’s true subject just doesn’t quite ever get chosen. Is it Freud? London? The coming war? The past? At one moment, London is described (to Freud’s perplexity) as a city where feeling must be hidden behind humor, at another as a city quaintly going about its Our Town–like ways (a postman’s “wife is pregnant with what will become the goalkeeper of a first-division ball team 1962-67”), at another as a city where no one has an inner life. Even if a reader just follows along with the author’s mercuric eye, there’s still the matter of Freud, like Tel’s London, never quite getting in focus, solidifying, or deepening, resulting in a book that, at end, has a central figure but not really a central character.
A museum of a place and time that’s filled, however brightly, with trinkets.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-219-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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