by Leah Hager Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2007
Not as dramatic as Cohen clearly intends it to be.
A wannabe actress confronts dramas that disable her high-achieving family in this heartfelt third novel from the Massachusetts author (Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight, 2005, etc.).
When 20-year-old Beatrice Fisher-Hart is granted a free year to live at home and pursue her thespian dreams, she crosses a hitherto firmly drawn line by reestablishing contact with her maternal grandmother Margaret Fourcey, a celebrated stage actress from whom “Bebe’s” mother—Cambridge psychologist Sarah—has been estranged for many years. As Bebe becomes a regular at Margaret’s Beacon Hill “salon,” her growing intimacy with its beautiful people is compromised by two unconventional relationships: her May-December crush on middle-aged theater director Hale Rubin, and baffled feelings about the mess into which her father Jeremy (also a psychologist and a college teacher) has again gotten himself—by making inappropriately suggestive remarks to yet another female student. Bebe’s confusions are further exacerbated as she learns more of the family history that divides her mother and grandmother, and they come to a head during a summer spent at a farm in the Berkshires, where the production in which Hale has cast her—as one of several classic lovers who defied convention—is rehearsed and performed. It’s somewhat surprising when the novel leaps ahead nearly 30 years for a muted ending that reveals choices and compromises Bebe has made, and the partial relaxation of her anger toward her errant, needy father. Cohen, who practices a domestic realism that has earned her comparisons to Sue Miller and Anne Tyler (but is actually closer to that of Elizabeth Berg and Luanne Rice), writes smoothly and with genuine conviction. But her well-manicured fiction has few lifelike rough edges, and even its most emotional moments feel superficial and overfamiliar.
Not as dramatic as Cohen clearly intends it to be.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06451-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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