These New Yorkerstyle short stories are filled with middle- class characters, most of whom—in defiance of travel-literature conventions—steadfastly refuse to experience an epiphany. Despite some fine writing, this uniformity kills Dark's (The Literary Lover, not reviewed) project. In William Maxwell's ``The Gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel,'' a couple returns with their daughter and niece to a spot visited 18 years earlier and find, to the husband's dismay, that the place has changed. The couple in Ward Just's ``I'm Worried About You''- -Marshall and Jan—travels through Europe and ends up in Paris, where a male friend lives and where Marshall feels a momentary longing for another kind of life. In the stories dealing with men making it with foreign women, the latter are uniformly empty and uninvolved. In James Salter's ``American Express,'' two American guys, ``lawyers and sons of lawyers,'' visit several Italian cities. One picks up an Italian woman and buys her a fur coat. Allen Barnett's ``Succor'' does a better job with international relations: An HIV-positive man who cares for AIDS patients in his home returns to Rome, where he lived at 19, and dines with his then-lover, who is engaged to be married. Sue Miller's ``Travel'' follows two of the better delineated characters here, former lovers Oley and Rob, who travel to Peru together and discover that things still do not work between them. Lorrie Moore's ``Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People'' also stands out, because it is one of the few stories with characters who are openly tourists. When Abby can't decide whether or not to stay with her husband, she and her mother travel to Ireland, where they queue up to kiss the Blarney Stone, which phobic Abby finds ``very unhygienic for a public attraction.'' These are exceptions, however, to travelers who are so civilized that they are affected by nothing. So why not just stay home? All the excitement of a trans-Atlantic flight.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84578-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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