``Becoming involved in a relationship is a lot like being lured into a Hare Krishna cult''—so begins this long narrative necklace of good-natured one-liners posing as a novel of twentysomething love. Sasha Schwartz is a wisecracking young N.Y.C. ad-agency ``creative director'' in charge of writing toothpaste and paper- towel commercials. She spends her free time (i.e., most of the time her boss isn't watching her) talking on the phone with girlfriends Viv and Frannie and writing jingles about her ex-boyfriend, Bryce, who has recently left her—she suspects for a man named Glen, whose letters she's found in the apartment she and Bryce shared. (``Girl meets boy/Then boy meets boy/That's the story line these days/Oh, it's no joy/To love a gay,'' goes a typical ditty.) That's the plot; and the only event in the next 250 pages that could possibly be seen as an advancement of that plot is when Sasha runs into Bryce in a bar and is introduced to Glen, who is blond-haired, miniskirted, voluptuous, and very much a female. (Oh, well—so much Sasha's previous obsessional worries about AIDS.) Otherwise, the book is a jumble of Bob Dylan quotes mixed in with bathetic reminiscences of Sasha's childhood, Viv's phone harangues, rejected ad copy, rash jokes, secondary characters' glowing assessments of Sasha's talents, character, and looks, one whole chapter devoted to numbers (``461, 462, 463...'') representing Sasha counting sheep as she tries to forget Bryce and sleep—and three or four authentically funny moments, all of which take place in the presence of Sasha's personable fellow ad-agency worker Jerry, known as ``Jerriatrics.'' A pinch of promise in a sophomoric brew—and hardly the work of the ``Nora Ephron of the MTV generation,'' as the publisher's promo copy claims.
Pub Date: July 26, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09465-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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