Ambitious, on occasion accomplished, but the question is still: Why?
British author Barnard (Poker Face, not reviewed) offers an anemic study of a young woman’s growing involvement in the world of London strip clubs.
Why does Belle George want to be a stripper? Take your pick: (1) She may be a lesbian and hopes that overexposure to female flesh will decrease her desire; (2) Ungainly and unfeminine, she thinks working as a costumed dancer might cure her oafishness; (3) She wants to be in show business like her glamorous mother, who hosts a popular television program; or (4) She’s an emotional masochist. Unfortunately, none of these explanations is explored in any depth, making it rather unlikely that a naive, upper-class young woman would suddenly decide on a career even her fellow strippers want to escape. As the narrative begins, Belle auditions at Xanadu with Sylvie, a teenager who hopes a brief stint at the strip club will garner her the union card she needs to pursue a proper acting career. Since Sylvie has nowhere to go, Belle takes the girl to her roach-infested flat, hoping they’ll become best friends. The two go to rehearsals, and Belle gradually improves, eagerly awaiting the day when she will graduate from the burlesque chorus to her own solo strip routine. But the on-the-job camaraderie she wished for never materializes; the other strippers view her as a poser who has better options but chooses to slum it for fun. She sexually pursues her boss and is puzzled when nothing comes from her obvious advances. Finally, it’s apparent that there’s only one explanation for Belle’s inability to reflect on her circumstances or interact with those around her: she’s just not very bright. Barnard’s portrait of the strip-club subculture is fascinating, as is her exploration of Belle’s co-dependent relationship with her successful mother, but these qualities simply can't overcome a poorly drawn lead character.
Ambitious, on occasion accomplished, but the question is still: Why?Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-86049-551-6
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Virago/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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