A morbidly obese novella.
Three high-school chums torment each other with a trip to Manhattan before coming clean about a long-festering secret.
Rhonda, Holly and Gina Kay were the three teen musketeers of the small Texas town of Lamberton. Rhonda, the brain of the group, went on to college and a successful legal career after being forcibly separated from her obsession, high-school boyfriend Terry Robertson. Holly had dreams of fashion fame but has settled for a bustling wedding-gown business in Waco. Gina Kay grew up dirt poor in a manufactured home with loving parents. (Her mother, grossly overweight and in need of constant care, was unable to leave her house.) With Holly and Rhonda’s support, Gina Kay won the Miss American Teenager beauty pageant title—and scholarship. In college, Rhonda started seeing Terry again surreptitiously, even after he tried to kill her by ramming his convertible into a tree. Although he’s heir to a ranching fortune, his dark past and forbidding father have nourished a mean and self-destructive streak. Rhonda and Gina Kay have been estranged since Gina Kay dropped out of college suddenly and eloped with Terry. Cut to the present, when the last of Terry’s many vehicular suicide attempts has succeeded, and the trio gathers at Gina Kay’s ranch after his funeral. There, a pageant event the pretext, the three, in their 40s now, decide to take a Manhattan reunion-and-reconciliation trip. The women befriend their New York City driver, Russian immigrant G.W., ultimately planning a wedding for his daughter in Brighton Beach. Suspense is of the flashback-fueled, wait-and-hurry-up variety, and narrative padding postpones Rhonda’s disappointing assignation with a would-be lover. Worse, Gina Kay refuses to explicate the Terry situation until trip’s end. Along the way, there are large chunks of Manhattan logistics and less-than-convincing apologias for good but dull husbands before getting to the genuinely intriguing questions: What really happened between Gina Kay and Terry, and can Rhonda ever get it out of her system?
A morbidly obese novella.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-684-87388-5
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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