A first novel that fails in every respect—plot, characterization and language mangled beyond belief.
Cheesy melodrama about a plastic surgeon, 9/11, AIDS, blackmail and revenge.
Dr. Richard Gallin is off his game. The Park Avenue plastic surgeon has scaled back his procedures drastically; he pads around his office barefoot. It’s January 2002, and the doctor is still disoriented after the death of his son Bernardo on 9/11. The insurance money (millions!) has come through for his widow Karin, but her husband’s wedding ring was all that was retrieved from the Twin Towers. And something else is pressing on Gallin. A journalist, Nick Adams, is threatening to write an exposé about him even though there’s no dirt, unless you count his promiscuity years ago, after his wife’s death from cancer. Adams comes to the office. He’s a redhead, and that damns him; Gallin believes all redheaded males are dishonest. What’s motivating Adams is Gallin’s dismissal of his nurse Peter, who had volunteered that he was HIV positive; Adams is Peter’s lover. Gallin can handle this, but can he handle the return of Bernardo? For his son is alive! Escaping the inferno, and realizing he no longer loved his wife (hence the discarded ring), Bernardo hightailed it to Florida. Now he’s back, asking his father to change his appearance. Since he’d already created a new identity in Florida, this makes no sense; nor does it make sense that Gallin would consent to the surgery, thus participating in insurance fraud, or re-hire Peter to help him. Making sense, though, was never a consideration for a writer who values excess above everything. That excess feeds on itself when Gallin is mugged, and then hires his mugger to take care of Adams, which he does, brutally. When the mugger shows up to claim his reward (ten grand, plus surgery for his own sorry self), the story comes to a sudden halt, a resolution seemingly impossible.
A first novel that fails in every respect—plot, characterization and language mangled beyond belief.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-196-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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