An inoffensive astronomer gets involved with a new assistant suspected of killing her husband and stepdaughterand watches his own life dissolve under her spellin a first novel from British author Rigbey. The moment she arrives at California's Tradescant Observatory, everybody sniffs around Julia Fox like dogs in heat, but her favor inexplicably falls on a workaday second-rater named Lomax, who shambles into her bed only to find that she's about to be arrested for shooting lawyer-husband Lewis and his blank-slate daughter, Gail. Since Lomax has got into a messy dispute with Professor Anthony Berlins, the eminent head of his project, which has forced both of the men into a summer-length leave, he has plenty of time to hang around the office of Julia's lawyer, beat the bushes of dead husband Lewis's address book, and hold fumbling interviews with potential witnesses. Rigbey is particularly good at evoking Lomax's appealing amateurishness in all these endeavorshis piercing awareness of his incompetence, his pathetic gratitude whenever he runs into somebody (his unsentimental ex-wife Candice, hard-bitten librarian Dorothy Cleaver, an olfactory expert known only as the Nose) who can give him an ounce of help or sympathy. But the momentum Lomax lacks gets into the storytelling, too, until you feel you're watching Sisyphus deposing hopeless witnesses, most of whom remain almost as fuzzy as distant nebulaeor as Lomax himself. Lomax eventually realizes that the observatory's director has maneuvered both him and Professor Berlins to the sidelines in order to publicize a total solar eclipse with the kind of hype usually reserved for, say, big, gaudy first novels. Lomax is still bemused when Julia's trial finally comes up. By this time, though, the back-and-forth of the courtroom carries the story to a conclusion that will leave most readers wondering how they could have missed something so obvious. Perry Mason through a glass darkly. Summer readingfor people with time on their hands. (First printing of 100,000; $150,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild featured alternate)
Pub Date: July 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79579-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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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