Filled with gentle uplift, but sorry-for-herself Sima is a difficult heroine to like.
A mild first novel about an unhappy older woman whose life brightens when she hires a new assistant for her lingerie shop in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Sima’s marriage to Lev, a retired teacher, has been a long slog of mutual loneliness ever since Sima realized she could not have children. Although she can be charming with her female customers, whose daily life Stanger-Ross captures with a lively eye for detail, Sima has become a bitter, shrewish wife to passive Lev, whose every tic annoys her. But from the moment Timna, a beautiful Israeli girl staying with family in Brooklyn, wonders into the lingerie shop Sima runs in the basement of her Boro Park house, Sima’s life begins to change. Timna not only brings youthful energy to the shop and willingly chats with Lev, she also willingly shares her joys and worries with Sima. Waiting for her boyfriend to finish his compulsory military service, she has met some fast-lane Israelis in New York. She seems the daughter Sima always dreamed of having: beautiful, energetic, loving. Fascinated by Timna’s adventures and increasingly dependent on her, almost obsessed, Sima remembers her unsatisfactory relationship with her own mother and the early years of her marriage, when she and Lev shared moments of genuine happiness before she learned the secret she has held back from him all these years: her infertility stems from scars left by a cured venereal disease she contracted during a brief adolescent fling. Sima’s coldness toward Lev stems from her guilt. When she finally tells him the truth, he says it wasn’t worth ruining their marriage. Meanwhile, Sima is worried about Timna, whom she suspects, based on circumstantial evidence, is pregnant. Following Timna into Manhattan, Sima has a near romantic encounter of her own. Eventually Timna reunites with her boyfriend and goes on with her life, while Sima and Lev resuscitate their moribund relationship.
Filled with gentle uplift, but sorry-for-herself Sima is a difficult heroine to like.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59020-089-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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