An impressive step forward for an increasingly serious entertainer.
Polly Solo-Miller Demarest has all that she always expected to have: "a husband, two children, a strong family, and a month's summer holiday in Maine. Once she was married, her life had been so accomplished that all she had to do was live it. But it turned out that life was not a straight path. You woke up on the wrong side of the law with the right set of feelings."
That wrong side of the law is represented here by Lincoln Bennett, a painter with whom Polly has been having an inextricable affair—one that goes against the grain of her upbringing (among the rich, Jewish, very correct, and close Solo-Millers), of her love for lawyer-husband Henry. And, though the family is a haven and fidelity is a spine in a life that's otherwise treacherously jellied: "What did a smoothly run house, good meals, sweet children, and an admirable husband matter if you felt your heart being torn to pieces?" Such is Polly's quandary—and it's fleshed out with some of Colwin's most heartfelt prose: the mix of pain with authorial breeze and social-antenna perceptiveness is occasionally quite spectacular in terms of tone; there are fewer jokes than in Happy All the Time, though some of the comic description is inspired (an after-dinner pianist "played exclusively as background, but the expression on his face was that of an ingenious veterinarian who had quelled a room of anxious schnauzers"); and Colwin's drumming insistence on the conflict between (and complexity within) personal and family happiness gives this novel more than a little Russian flavor—Chekhovian intimacy, Tolstoyan responsibility, longueurs and passions. So, though the ruminant theme announced in the title flattens some of the feeling here (Polly's agony comes across only fitfully, the hurt and confusion muted by the author's nervously churning reflections), Colwin is to be credited for having gone beyond the mere charm of her previous work. And if the ingredients for emotional combustion never quite explode in this richly ambitious novel, they are graceful, unsimplified, very often strikingly—and fully—stated.
An impressive step forward for an increasingly serious entertainer.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1982
ISBN: 0-06-095897-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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