Still, a collection of small, perfectly chosen moments, seamlessly woven together.
A first outing, wonderfully streamlined and unsentimental, about a couple of big-city refugees in rural Pennsylvania who conduct a vicious relationship skirmish.
Some relationship novels simply spin their wheels, offer minute analysis of the most mundane lives, adding homespun wisdom and the occasional uplifting, ready-made resolution. And some are like this one, which, though resolutely a novel of relationships—of people rather than story—manages to offer up a unique tale of love and the battlefields it is fought on. Set in a small Pennsylvania town that seems unchanged by time, it tells of Nina, a designer of oddly engineered, Rube-Goldberglike machines who is locked into a decades-long love/hate relationship with her boyfriend Tony, a painter and professor. Nina’s encounter with Bill, an older man who lives nearby watching over a farm, opens up a can of worms between herself and Tony. The two of them have been playing a passive-aggressive cheating-revenge game for some years now, and when Bill unexpectedly opens up to Nina about an affair he had back in the 1950s with his brother’s French wife, it awakens a heretofore-unknown level of hostility in Nina toward the flirty, philandering Tony. Happily for readers, Latuchie spends a decent amount of time flashing away from Nina’s neurotic present (she’s an interesting and sharp character, but, as her friends keep noting, she has a tendency to go on in “fucking, endless patterns”). The narrative presents a latticework of stories from Nina and Tony’s past as well as Bill’s, especially about the aftermath of his affair and the collateral damage it caused his family. The only detail that doesn’t quite work is the title’s “honey wall,” a nest of hidden bees made to serve as a belabored metaphor for the erotic repercussions of illicit affairs.
Still, a collection of small, perfectly chosen moments, seamlessly woven together.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05837-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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