A richly textured, sometimes-entertaining, but often sluggish and ultimately unconvincing gay romance.
A young architect searches for love in Victorian London’s gay demimonde in this debut novel.
Fleeing scandal in America, 20-year-old architecture student Colin Edwards arrives in London in 1891 and sets his sights on 41-year-old modernist architect Henry Sewell as mentor and conquest. Thanks to “golden-fair skin,” “imperious eyebrows,” “burnished blond hair,” and an arch pickup line, Colin has Henry at “isn’t it ironic that a man of contemporary architecture should have to exit through such archaically monstrous doors?” Henry duly installs Colin in his town house and bed, hires him as an architect, and even legally adopts him as a son with benefits. Henry showcases him at Porter’s, a gentlemen’s club where handsome youths and sugar daddies court one another, featuring bitchy cameos by Oscar Wilde and his lover, Bosie. Colin wants monogamy but accommodates Henry’s preference for orgies. Soon Colin has had sex with nearly every Porter’s habitué and is toasted as “the Prince with the Golden Mouth.” His architecture flourishes as well, culminating in Helios House, a three-story, circular mansion with a glass-roofed central atrium that sounds a bit like a miniature Astrodome but is by all accounts a masterpiece. He stays faithful to Henry but, alas, Henry starts to regard Colin as an “aging, overweight workaholic” with “stupid-looking spectacles.” After Colin turns 29 and incurs a few wrinkles, Henry callously dumps (and fires) him in favor of untethered promiscuity with dewier youths. Much weeping and smashing of objets d’art ensues before the distraught Colin decamps to New York, where he pretty much goes on as before: working as an architect; drinking at “the Carlisle,” Manhattan’s answer to Porter’s; and pursuing relationships with much older men. Swift’s sprawling novel skillfully revels in the atmospherics of upper-crust life in the Gay Nineties: the furtive codes; the dandyism (“Colin’s silk shirt was a creamy white, its sleeves fastened at the end with gold cufflinks studded with diamonds and rubies”); the catty repartée (He: “If you’re going to be a proper seducer, you must never play all of your cards straight away.” He: “I would expect someone your age to be such a fount of wisdom”). But while the dialogue and decor are luxurious and often fun to read, the romantic storytelling feels bloated yet insubstantial. Debauchery is hinted at but not spelled out; most of the book’s 702 pages spool out in Colin and his friends fretting and ruminating drearily about their relationships while sitting in Porter’s, and then rehashing them in endless trans-Atlantic letters. Colin is a male Mary Sue, declared by everyone to be gorgeous, brilliant, and noble, but he’s not a very intriguing character; meanwhile, his youth- and cufflinks-obsessed milieu seems lubricious and callow. (Women rarely appear in the tremulous melodrama, but Colin’s liveliest and most resonant encounters are with them: his mother and sisters, whom he visits after a long estrangement; a smart, spirited, love-struck heiress whom he fends off by feigning tuberculosis but who is the most fully realized character.) Readers may find themselves wishing Colin would get out of his gentlemen’s clubs and live a little.
A richly textured, sometimes-entertaining, but often sluggish and ultimately unconvincing gay romance.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-5536-1
Page Count: 702
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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