Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the suburbs, Fielding turns up the heat again in this latest nightmarish Diary of a Mad Housewife. Kate Sinclair isn't really mad, of course, but she may be the only one in Palm Beach who isn't. The clients she sees every day for family therapy are troubled and confused, and some of them—like Donna Lokash, whose daughter Amy has been missing for over a year—are far worse. Kate's mother, it's painfully obvious, is sinking into Alzheimer's. Her teenaged daughter Sara may not be crazy, but her lying and smoking and sneaking around seem calculated to drive her mother mad. Kate's husband Larry, who ought to be helping support her through midlife hot flashes and polyps and cancer scares, is withdrawing into his golf game just when Kate's old boyfriend Robert Crowe has turned up again, clearly determined to consummate the romance he ended in high school when Kate wouldn't come across. But it's the flamboyant Jo-Lynn Baker, Kate's half-sister, who opens the gate to the real nightmare when she announces to Kate that she's in love with Colin Friendly, the smiling sociopath accused of killing 13 women. As in her earlier soccer-mom chillers (Don't Cry Now, 1995, etc.), Fielding cunningly plays on Kate's most homely fears and fantasies—she dreams of wild trysts with Robert, of a better sex life with Larry, of getting along with Sara without wanting to hit her—just at the point that they're shading into florid melodrama, so that when Kate wishes that she could be 17 again, you can see just how poignant and terrifying a Pandora's box that wish can be. Anybody who's ever been afraid of going gray or flabby, losing her looks or her husband, or rattling the skeletons in the family closet will be hopelessly hooked. (First printing of 175,000; Literary Guild selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-47821-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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
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
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