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LOVE MONKEY

Funny material corrupted by a protagonist who grows less funny the longer you know him.

Pitiable young man seeking woman—any woman.

The whining narrator and male Bridget Jones stand-in here (he even has a slight weight problem) is Tom Farrell, in his early 30s, a guy who spends most of his time rewriting copy at Tabloid, a disreputable in-your-face paper that’s an obvious New York Post stand-in. Off-hours, Tom watches TV in his Upper West Side bachelor pad or moons after Julia, the lovely, flakey, much-younger copy girl who keeps giving him just enough rope to embarrass himself with. Things start off promisingly, as author Smith (who, as book review editor at People, has read enough relationship fiction to do this kind of thing blindfolded) has a smart way with Tom’s roiling inner monologue—enough to keep a reader engaged even when nothing in particular is going on. The monologues are nothing a smarter-than-average Maxim reader wouldn’t come up with (on the coolness of Bugs Bunny, why it’s too much work to shop anywhere but Banana Republic, the myriad ways women are insane), but they’re entertaining nevertheless and dashed with a pleasing amount of malice. Smith is even sharp enough to deflect High Fidelity comparisons by referring to that book on page five. Unfortunately, though, the reader has to get dragged through Tom’s increasingly depressing nonrelationship with Julia—and all the other women he tries to hook up with; this isn’t bad in itself, but the longer you know Tom, the quicker you realize that he’s not just a schlubby loser with a sardonic take on life: he’s an arrogant bastard with bitter contempt for anyone who lives life differently from the way he does. For a novel with higher pretensions, such a character might not present a problem, but for a book apparently aiming to be just a light, sassy Hornby/Fielding knockoff, it’s a fatal flaw to have this narrow-minded wank at its center.

Funny material corrupted by a protagonist who grows less funny the longer you know him.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2004

ISBN: 0-06-057453-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003

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A LITTLE LIFE

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. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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