A warmhearted tale of crisis and friendship.
Long tells the story of a disorganized woman reacting to her friend’s AIDS diagnosis in this debut novella.
The biggest problem in Annie Winters’ life is that she’s never on time for anything. Such is the case when she’s preparing for a night out with her girlfriends and her friend Bo stops by, having just returned to New York City from a visit with his family in Georgia. She and Bo have been friends since childhood, and an easy intimacy exists between them, largely centered on jokes, gossip, and food. It’s apparent to her that Bo is acting strangely, and he refuses to join her and their friends for their night on the town. The pair part on good terms, but Annie knows something’s up. What she doesn’t know is how big that something is: “Never in my wildest dreams,” she narrates, “did I envision my life being turned around so drastically in a twenty-four-hour period.” The next day, Bo arrives with breakfast and big news: he has AIDS. He contracted the disease during a temporary relapse into heroin use, an old habit connected to his service in the Vietnam War. The diagnosis led to Bo’s losing his job and his family disowning him. Annie promises to help see him through to the end of his illness, but the pressure of the circumstances—and the ways in which they each react to them—threatens to cause them to squander the time that they have left. Long’s prose is maximalist and conversational, giving readers the sensation that they’re hearing it over the phone as one long monologue. She writes Annie as gregarious and voluble, a woman who reacts to things deeply and loudly. Bo comes off as even-tempered and self-deprecating, and the friendship between the two feels genuine, even when their actions and reactions are occasionally theatrical. The story ends up about where readers will expect it, and Long isn’t afraid of sentimentality, which saps the ending of some of its profundity. Even so, she offers a caregiving story that’s full of humor and petty concerns, creating relatable characters that, after the end comes, readers will miss.
A warmhearted tale of crisis and friendship.Pub Date: April 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4257-5198-2
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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