A basic boy-meets-girl debut that’s unfortunately tarted up with outlandish characters who sound like dropouts from an indie...
Picaresque debut about the crooked path of a true love between two unlikely people in an unlikely place.
Ruby Falls is an arty LA glam-girl, an animator who works on a children’s cartoon series and lives in the guesthouse of an aging porn queen named Jeannie, whose Laurel Canyon homestead is a kind of low-rent San Simeon—full of dogs, perverts, and artists of various stripes. Ray Rose is a divorced Florida construction worker who inherited a rather grand house from a total stranger who picked his name out of a telephone book. Where will Ray and Ruby’s paths cross? In Alaska, actually, where they both go to get away from some bad stuff. What kind? We’re told at the start that Ray killed a man (though we don’t get the details right away) and that his most recent wife left him a few months ago. As for Ruby, she came home one night to find that an intruder had shot all of Jeannie’s dogs, then raped and killed the dog-walker. Plus, she has lately given up on her Iranian boyfriend. So there’s plenty to forget on both sides. In Alaska, Ruby climbs mountains and Ray moves into a small campsite, where he finds work as a handyman and carpenter. The two meet in a bar and fall in love, but in between their bouts of kayaking and lovemaking, both find themselves still troubled by the darker shadows of their past lives. Eventually, they work the shadows, only to find that the present holds troubles and griefs of its own.
A basic boy-meets-girl debut that’s unfortunately tarted up with outlandish characters who sound like dropouts from an indie sitcom and that suffers from workshop prose (“Early mornings are all about the ax, chainsaw, stump grinder, and tractor”) as thick as treacle.Pub Date: March 18, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-398-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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