Debut novelist Berry creates relatable characters who can laugh at themselves even when they fall down hard, but the gist of...
Best friends, both creatives, keep their wine glasses at the ready as they try to make it big without selling their souls.
Emma Derringer considers herself a writer, validated by her blog's steadily growing number of followers. But her daily life belongs mostly to “her alter ego: someone who worked in advertising and meant it.” Working at APRC is mind-numbing, but it’s supposed to be temporary. Emma’s best friend, Clementine, could never survive at an office job even though she has zero money. Recently back from a year studying screenwriting at Columbia, Clem expected to return to London on the verge of success. Instead, she has a jerk of an actor ex-boyfriend whose name is already plastered on billboards, making her feel that much worse about working nights at her old college bar. Now that these friends are in the same city again, they can at least drink away their problems together—complaining about exes and bosses from hell is a lot easier than figuring out how to make their dreams reality. In contrast to Emma and Clem with their Debbie-downer attitudes, there is Emma’s DJ roommate, Paul, who's equal parts hot mess and accomplished in his career, and Yasmin, Emma’s frenemy, who seems predictably airheaded at the start but may just be the happiest of the lot. But when Emma’s blogworthy items go from sexy encounters and wasted nights to health scares and questions of moral integrity, the tension starts to bubble over. What more will it take to get Emma and Clem to become people they actually like? Berry sustains a witty voice with an enjoyable flair for the dramatic throughout, but the actual drama of the story falls flat. The seeds are planted, fiddled with, but then dropped—many of the women's problems are solved without them having to work very hard at it.
Debut novelist Berry creates relatable characters who can laugh at themselves even when they fall down hard, but the gist of the book can be summed up when one of them approaches a problem by “produc[ing] a piece of writing about it and put[ting] it all behind her.”Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12690-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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