Newcomer Orlando's overlong, ultimately unrewarding look into the dark past of the 1981 graduating class of an exclusive Manhattan prep school. It's five years since graduation, and Michael Cadenhead, working for an N.Y.C. newspaper, is sifting through his peaceful if boring life when Douglas Taft, a former classmate, is stabbed in an apparent burglary attempt. Mike is summoned to the hospital—and thus reunited with the rich Thorndike School pack. Then another former classmate dies under mysterious circumstances, and Mike begins to investigate it for his paper. Interviews of Douglas, and Douglas's gorgeous supermodel sister Annabelle, will lead him into the sordid Thorndike past and the revelation of the Big Secret around which the novel is formed. Mike's investigation focuses on graduation weekend five years previous and on that weekend's Anthesteria—an annual bacchanalian jet-set party and the setting in which the mysterious event occurs. As Mike suspects from the outset, the mystery—like the fast set's school life—revolves around Annabelle and the various young men whom her beauty provokes into obsession. Orlando skillfully places us inside this already well-explored brat pack world of super-rich New York kids, but in doing so he makes Douglas, Annabelle, and their friends speak at a breakneck speed, often in partial phrases or with references to unspecified events in their shared past, and with very little action along the way. His duplication of ``real-life'' dialogue is Orlando's strong point; even so, it makes for a lot to fight through to find out the Big Secret. Interesting for Orlando's skill at duplicating realistic dialogue, but a long-winded, difficult read that is just too late for the brat pack bus.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-66978-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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