A bittersweet comedy with a fine sharp edge.
The contrasting virtues of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Eudora Welty’s elegiac family reunion novel Losing Battles are neatly conjoined in this entertaining 11th from the popular North Carolina author (The Christmas Letters, 1996, etc.).
A reunion brings together several former college roommates and friends, 35 years after the great adventure of their youth: a 1965 trip by raft down the Mississippi River (“Just like Huck and Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”), from Paducah, Kentucky, to New Orleans. Center stage are five of the girls: never-married schoolteacher (and former would-be writer) Harriet Holding, unhappily married Courtney Ralston, thrice-married beauty Catherine Hurt, successful romance novelist Anna “Todd,” and the group’s wealthy, impulsive golden girl, Margaret “Baby” Ballou—recently deceased, and seen only in the extended flashbacks that Smith skillfully interweaves with the present action. We eventually learn a great deal about each of these five, and the potential for sudsy cliché (Catherine’s discovery of a lump in her breast, “perfect” Courtney’s disastrous plunge into adultery) is deflected by vivid dialogue and what might be called rhetorical special effects, including several of Baby’s narcissistic yet pointedly self-critical poems (one contains the lines “but I’m such a bitch/deep inside/where I hide”) and hilarious parodies of the paperback-Gothic sensibility that suffuses both Anna’s fiction and her imagined romance with a handsome young steward on The Belle of Natchez (the steamboat on which “the last girls” are reliving their youth). Best of all is Smith’s sympathetic characterization of the central figure of Harriet: an intelligent, reserved woman who quietly accepts responsibility for having helped destroy her own happiness, and perhaps also the privileged, ill-fated Baby Ballou’s precipitous decline.
A bittersweet comedy with a fine sharp edge.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-363-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
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
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