Adolescent angst.
Sibling rivalry carried to the max in a first novel about sisters living unhappily together in Chicago.
While their mother is dying of cancer, high-school senior Molly moves in with her older sister Amanda, lifestyles editor at a magazine. A thoroughly subjective narrator, Molly portrays Amanda as evil, almost deranged. Molly’s antagonism fuels the plot, but whether it's justified remains a question (Haines drops occasional hints to the contrary). Years earlier, Molly and Amanda’s father, a successful therapist, disappeared. Their now-destitute mother, who may or may not have been her husband’s patient, sold their house and moved them to a tumbledown mansion she hoped to renovate. Amanda, then a teenager who managed the household for her weak mother, convinced her to take a boarder. Not allowed to meet him herself, Molly knew Amanda and her mother secretly made separate weekly visits to the mysterious Mr. Graf. As in so much of the story, the timeline and Molly’s age during this period remain murky: if Amanda, who has graduated from college and had time to become a successful professional, was then in high school, Molly should have been quite young when the secret of Mr. Graf’s identity was revealed, but she comes across as at least preteen and already jaded. Molly blames Amanda for much of the pain she and her mother went through, and she gets her revenge, at least in her own mind, by seducing Amanda’s boyfriend Nathaniel, a sexy if slightly perverted businessman who never coalesces into a real character. At the same time, Molly hooks up with a wealthy classmate who whisks her away to Europe to have his baby. The scenes with Molly’s mother achieve a genuine sadness and sense of loss, but in general the tale suffers from Molly’s unrelentingly brittle voice. Although Amanda’s behavior at the end seems to reinforce Molly’s accusations, Molly remains such a little bitch that Amanda gets the benefit of the doubt.
Adolescent angst.Pub Date: April 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14857-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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