The novel ends on a cliffhanger—all to the good, except it presupposes that the reader will have slogged through to the end...
The president is now not only black but also Jewish, and the tea partiers are having fits.
Well, not quite: Like Sammy Davis Jr., Luke Cooper wasn’t entirely born with those credentials, and the presidential election is still three years off when we meet him. Governor Cooper is one of the youngest state executives in the nation, and, as Goff writes by way of introduction, “widely recognized as a rising national star in the Democratic Party.” His wife Laura—try not to think of General Hospital—hates politics but is willing to support Luke as he follows his bliss, even willing to try to keep up with his sartorial splendor, for Luke knows how to rock an Armani suit. Although he’s been dubbed “the GQ Candidate,” he’s an amateur compared to some of the folks in his moneyed circle, powerful lawyers and hedge-fund managers who broker a dozen deals before breakfast and live lives befitting a Roman emperor. All of these things have political consequences; one of his confidants, for instance, figures in the news from time to time in articles “claiming that he had used his relationship with the governor as leverage for business opportunities,” with said confidant himself proclaiming, “The gov and I are like family. After all he wouldn’t be governor without me so you have nothing to worry about.” It’s anyone’s guess whether the author or the confidant is the one guilty of crimes against the English language, but this novel is flat and uninvolving, its characters shallow; what isn’t transparently borrowed from a certain real-life well-dressed president of color (hey, look, there’s Rahm Emanuel!) drifts by unremarkably. Goff's imagining of an ugly primary campaign in which mud is flung and bedclothes slung could have come from the headlines, too, while the stuff requiring imagination seems an afterthought.
The novel ends on a cliffhanger—all to the good, except it presupposes that the reader will have slogged through to the end of this overlong, unrewarding debut.Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5872-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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
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
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