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THE JEWELS OF TESSA KENT

A nice soapy title for a nice soapy Krantz: the author’s usual up-market labels mixed with a little mother-daughter drama and some heart-wrenching terminal illness. Tessa Kent, born Teresa Horvath, becomes a big-time movie star at age 16, two years after giving birth to a daughter, Maggie, whom Tessa’s devoutly Catholic parents bring up as Tessa’s little sister. Tessa would tell Maggie the truth about her birth if her parents weren—t against it, and she—d do it again, later, if her career weren—t so demanding. And yet again later, except that she meets the love of her life, Luke Blake, a billionaire Australian for whom Tessa’s virginity is very, very important. (Happily for Tessa, the doctors sewed her back up after delivery: in Judith Krantz, all things are possible.) By the time Luke has finally died and Tessa is ready to spill the beans, Maggie (now 18) has learned the truth on her own and severed all connection to her family. She takes her small savings to Manhattan, rents a room with a motherly lesbian who paints miniature portraits, and goes to work for a prestigious auction house. When Tessa discovers she has an incurable cancer and not long to live, she resolves to win back her daughter’s love; to do so, she offers her world-famous collection of jewelry for auction, on the condition that Maggie will spend six months with her, publicizing the sale. As a teenager, Tessa bought her first pearls at Tiffany’s, but it was Luke who really taught her the way around a precious stone, buying her huge emeralds, diamonds, and rubies and sometimes covering her body with them while he made love to her. By the close, it’s Maggie’s own pregnancy that will finally bring the two women together. Not as much of a tear-jerker as one might expect, but with lots of Krantz’s signature glamour. (Literary Guild main selection and Doubleday Book Club; TV satellite tour)

Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1998

ISBN: 0-609-60309-4

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

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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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