Van Wormer (Any Given Moment, 1995, etc.), who dedicates her fifth novel to ``the rest of the jury,'' not only served on a New York City murder trial but managed to get a good mystery-romance out of it. Did the accused—James Bennett Layton Jr., the ``poor little rich boy''—hire a hit man to murder model Sissy Cook, who spurned his advances and humiliated him in public? Did he leave her, drive his Jaguar to New Jersey, pick up the shooter, and take him back to Manhattan to blow Sissy's face off? Or did he, as he claims, black out on drugs and alcohol while someone else stole his car? Such must be decided by novelist Cornelia ``Libby'' Winslow and her fellow jurors—among them, Slicked-Back Ronnie, Wall Streeter William, Alex the Marlboro Man, Sweet Bridget, Elena from Brazil, Basha from Russia, and Eleanor from Sutton Place—while they dodge the media and simultaneously sort out the rest of their lives. Libby's career is going nowhere, she's broke, and she's just ended a demoralizing three-year relationship with lover Hal. It's not surprising, then, that she cheerfully welcomes the advances of Alex, a tall and handsome fellow juror, until he becomes proprietary and finally violent. But William, not nearly so tall or handsome, surprisingly begins to attract Libby a lot. Poor Will has been trying to unload his roommate Betsy, who came for sex a year earlier and never left. And another juror, Melissa, an advertising tyro in Donna Karan suits, has three years' sobriety in AA and is beginning to investigate her lesbianism. By the close, justice and romance will be served equally, with both a verdict and a bride. And Van Wormer, whose jury experience was obviously a memorable one, shows how Americans in an airless, overheated jury room can form powerful and rather uplifting bonds. A legal three-ring circus with brains and wit, populated with colorful New Yorkers of every stripe and class.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-70065-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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