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SMART WOMEN

In her popular books for young people, Blume has often worked empathically within a teen frame of reference; and here, though the prime focus is on the highs and histrionics of a trio of 40-ish, divorced professional women in Boulder, Colorado, it's their kids whose common-denominator fears and angers ring true. As for the mothers, they're a rather vacuous and tiresome lot: mother-of-two Margo (solar condo designer) counts up the 17 men she's slept with (including 21-year-old Eric) and has been divorced five years from Freddy, who wanted a Stepford Wife; real-estater Francine—a.k.a. "B.B."—lost her ten-year-old son in a car crash, divorced her journalist-husband, now clings to twelve-year-old daughter Sara; and oil heiress Clare is from Texas, with a philandering ex and a kid named Puffin. The women's men will criss-cross, of course. Thus, Margo is soaking in her hot-tub in her "funky upside down house" when Andrew, B.B.'s attractive ex, slides in on a neighborly visit; they'll soon be lovers. Meanwhile, fringe anorexic B.B., erstwhile friend of Margo, remains off-center with unresolved grief, her hate/need of Andrew, and traumatic family-past relationships: she's hovering near a breakdown. And, as Margo tries to juggle love, lust, and guilts, with B.B. dangerously raging and sulking, their children are adrift in the wake. Sara is slowly absorbed into the Margo/Andrew household—to the disgust of Margo's daughter Michelle, 17. Puffin becomes pregnant by Margo's son Stuart, and Michelle sees her through an abortion. Michelle has her first affair with Eric (Margo's Eric). The kids, often feeling "invisible," weather screaming fights, uprooting of their homes, and wonder why parents can't simply love them. ("You couldn't trust parents. They were only interested in you when they didn't have anyone else. As soon as they had lovers, forget it.") But finally, after B.B. has a near-fatal crackup, there's a flurry of upbeat fadeouts: B.B. is in therapy; Margo's kids, with Sara and Andrew, are beginning to coalesce into a family; there's a wedding in the works; and Margo, in her hot tub, counts her blessings. The kid-talk is convincing, even if the kids themselves are only moderately so. The adults, in or out of Jacuzzi, are flaky, arid, and just plain tiresome. But, like Blume's previous "adult" novel Wifey, this has enough glossy anguish to pull in her readership—with trendy-soap appeal to adolescents of all ages.

Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1983

ISBN: 0425206556

Page Count: 354

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1983

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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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