Old age makes Poppy more reflective but not by much: mostly diverting mind candy.
A frivolously obtuse protagonist, determined to live as she pleases, romps through the 20th century.
Mustard heiress Poppy Minkel is willfully ignorant, bent on pleasure, and insensitive—to her children, her help, even her religion (Judaism). Not very promising heroine material, though Poppy is also an original in everything from her clothes to her hobbies (she learns to fly), with liberated ideas about sex and a career. She narrates her own story, which moves from her native New York to Paris and the English countryside, then back to NYC as she charges through life with dizzying speed and little thought. Poppy begins as the news comes that her wealthy father has gone down with the Titanic. His grieving widow immediately abandons the search for a husband for their adolescent offspring, and Poppy remains reluctantly housebound until WWI, when mother and daughter head out to do voluntary work. Next, while working for fun at Macy’s, Poppy meets impoverished writer Gilbert Catchings. They marry and have a daughter, Sapphire, who gets left home with Poppy’s sister Honey when the couple move to Paris. The Depression affects relatives, but not Poppy, still fabulously wealthy, who ditches Gilbert for Reggie, an Englishman with tenuous ties to the royal family, an English manor, and a daughter. Soon widowed, Poppy returns to Paris, blissfully unaware of the advancing Germans, from whom she barely escapes. Back in New York, she continues to shock her conservative kin by opening an avant-garde art gallery, dressing flamboyantly, and behaving unsuitably. Deaths in the family rarely set her back as her artists flourish, discreet nips and tucks keep her looking good, as do great clothes.
Old age makes Poppy more reflective but not by much: mostly diverting mind candy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-69132-1
Page Count: 374
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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