Plenty of action, but far-fetched and joyless.
Bad decisions and even worse men endanger the orderly lives of close friends Charlotte and Janine.
As the stunning third trophy wife of charismatic African-American Reverend Curtis Black, Charlotte Black seems to have it all, including two adorable kids. But appearances are deceiving. Her husband spends most of his time on the road promoting his bestselling book, and he barely speaks to her when he is home, making her suspect that his needs are being met by someone else. And her five-year-old daughter Marissa seems disturbed, taken to playing with fire and saying shockingly antisocial things to her mother and older brother Mathew, while maintaining a sweet-as-pie façade in front of her father. The child’s bad-seed behavior brings up some serious issues, since Charlotte believes her little girl is not Curtis’s child, but rather the result of a disastrous affair she had with schizophrenic Aaron Malone. Clever Charlotte managed to keep the real lab results hidden, but her lie gets in the way of Marissa receiving the treatment she needs. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s best friend Janine has man troubles, too. Her deadbeat boyfriend Antonio seems resigned to not working, prompting Janine, a college professor, to ask him to leave. That doesn’t sit well with Antonio, who begins selling drugs out of her home as well as mentally abusing and threatening her. Terrified by this sociopath, she reports him to the cops, and he is arrested. Janine refuses to bail him out, which only makes him angrier, resulting in an inevitable, violent confrontation. Charlotte, in a somewhat confusing attempt to make her husband jealous, befriends his long-lost “brother” Larry, a recovering addict. Larry is truly bad news, and if anything, his criminal behavior makes Charlotte’s philandering preacher man look good in comparison, paving the way for a possible reconciliation. This latest potboiler from the author of Changing Faces (2006) keeps the scandals coming, but it would have benefited from a little more character development. It is often hard to believe that two strong women could have such consistently poor judgment when it comes to men.
Plenty of action, but far-fetched and joyless.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-089249-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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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