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GOODNIGHT SILKY SULLIVAN

A debut collection of six stories from Alberts (the novel Tempting Fate, 1987)—a writer especially good at weaving together, in a few pages, a saatisfying tapestry of voice, character, situation, and detail. The standout here is ``Blood Sand,'' about Daniel, a New York investment broker who throws over his wife and suburban life and moves to Hermosa, New Mexico, where he buys up ten acres and begins to build what a neighbor calls his ``hippie house.'' The story covers some 15 years, during which Daniel—alienated from his affluent parents as well as his East Coast origins—divorces, turns blue-collar, marries a local Hispanic girl, then divorces again before finding both love and acceptance. Likewise, the haunting title piece, told as a series of vignettes and family snapshots, covers a lot of ground in the life of an unhappily married man, a lawyer with an office job in the family factory. ``Between Revolutions: Holiday, 1982'' is a powerful (and more concentrated) tale about Grisha, a Russian teacher of English who wants to consummate his affair with Kate, an American exchange teacher, but can't find an apartment where the lovemaking might happen. It's a funny-sad story, juxtaposing the bleakness of Russian life with Kate's high-spirited American expectations. The same is true in ``Russia Is a Fish,'' except that here Kate wants to marry Kolya, a vigorous ex-seaman, only after he's lost interest in her. As for the other pieces: ``Dealing'' is a dreary tale of drugs and strung- out mornings, while ``Veterans'' is just a sketch about a woman's fascination with her veteran boyfriend and with memories of her own life in the 60's. Originally, the most impressive stories here—some of which first appeared in American Fiction and Nimrod—read like small novels, by turns lyrical and gritty.

Pub Date: May 29, 1995

ISBN: 0-8262-1009-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Univ. of Missouri

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995

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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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