Again combining the notion of women struggling to define themselves against the images of men who would dominate them, Naumoff (Silk Hope, NC, 1994, etc.) enriches the mix with a family dynamic that crosses gender and generations. Walter, the soft-spoken, naive director of the area Homes for Humanity, single-mindedly devotes himself to the betterment of blacks in his North Carolina community—but on meeting the much younger Louise he discovers a new object of devotion. Hers is a captivating innocence, and she seems to him not to be flawed like other women, such as Walter's sister Mary, a divorcÇe whose predatory sexuality and alcoholic despair constantly provoke her strait-laced brother. Louise is taken with Walter's goodness, too, so the two marry and live in bliss—until an ex-boyfriend, Louise's night-class instructor and a man with depraved sexual tastes, threatens to send Walter a video he secretly made of the two of them together. Sensing that something is amiss, Walter confronts Mary, in whom Louise had confided; working together, they remove the tape from the pervert's collection. Walter can't resist a peek at it, however, upon which his notion of Louise as untainted shifts and their relationship suffers. Seeing her sadness, her mother tries to snap Louise out of it by confessing that her own years of sacrifice to her husband's whims had root in her guilt at having abandoned him and Louise, then an infant, for six months. Wiser but still unhappy, Louise becomes increasingly aware that Walter, like every other man, has definite plans for his woman. Some odd bits—including a male amnesia victim formally adopted by Mary and used as her sex toy—but a thoughtful story in spite of its quirks, written in a style both crisp and clever.
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100231-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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