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LIVING UPSTAIRS

From the 1991 Lambda Award-winning author of the acclaimed Dave Brandstetter mysteries: a wartime idyll of Hollywood's colorful, disreputable gay community, told from the point of view of an aspiring young novelist. Suspicious of his artist roommate Hoyt Stubblefield's unexplained absences, Nathan Reed follows him to a memorial service for Communist organizer Eva Schaffer. There's something funny about Eva's ``accidental'' death—she was run over by a streetcar—but Hoyt, who's quietly trying to track down her killer, is as closemouthed as the Party regulars. Meanwhile, life goes on. An FBI agent warns Nathan to move out of Hoyt's to protect himself: ``I've seen your IQ scores.'' Nathan gets an advance on his autobiographical first novel and quits his drudgery at a bookstore to write full-time. Reggie Poole, Nathan and Hoyt's tenant, worries that Mike Voynich, the Adonis he thinks could be a star, will run out on him; Hoyt's friend Benbow Harsch, a philosophy professor who'd rather play the piano, cripples his fingers by stiffening the action on his new instrument. Rick Ames—once a writer, now a drinker—entangles Hoyt and Nathan with his threatening landlord Percy Hinkley and Percy's come-hither child-wife Linnet. Hoyt's erotic paintings of Nathan and himself enjoy a big success among private collectors. A skeleton at a Halloween party at the seamy Black Cat club tells Nathan he knows who killed Eva Schaffer; the next morning, police find the body of an unidentified man a block from the club. Nathan's awkwardly loving father shows up and sees Hoyt's tell- all paintings. Miraculously, all the plots eventually get tied up, though the lingering effect is one of unrushed reminiscence. Nathan is always contrasting his unfinished book with the falseness of The Human Comedy, but the ardent tenderness suffusing his own story—despite Hansen's evocation of constant uneasiness and veiled threats—recalls no one more than Saroyan.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1993

ISBN: 0-525-93682-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993

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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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