Adultery, incest, and fireworks aplenty in TV screenwriter Despres’s debut. But no real heat.
Former sweetheart wows Louisiana housewife, circa 1956.
It’s summer. It’s hot. And Sissy LeBlanc is bored and frustrated and tired of coping with her cranky kids, but there’s nothing she can do about it—until telephone lineman Parker Davidson comes back into her life. One hot kiss and she’s ready to follow him anywhere, although he’d just as soon not ruin her reputation—or deal with her husband Peewee. Too bad her blackmailing brats actually saw her smooching the gorgeous Parker. But their silence can be bought: Chip and Billy Joe want a deluxe chemistry set; Marilee wants a doll in a suitcase. Sissy complies, for who could forget a hunk like Parker—MVP in high school football, a WWII hero, and the man who got away, as far as she’s concerned. She’s understandably piqued when Parker shows up with a girlfriend—who turns out to be a distant relative Sissy never knew she had: her cousin Clara, the not-very-black daughter of her white uncle Tibor, an ambitious local politician and outspoken proponent of racial purity. Parker persuades her to hire Clara as a maid, and things go downhill from there. Clara believes Parker wants her only because she looks so much like Sissy, and quits. But Sissy is lost without the young woman’s help, not to mention pining for Parker, who’s driving her crazy (he calls for sweet talk every time he’s up a telephone pole). She finally agrees to a rendezvous in New Orleans, where she runs into her father-in-law, a Cajun stud named Bourrée LeBlanc. (A detour: Bourrée got her pregnant when she was 16 and took her to a backwoods abortionist, but scared Sissy opted out and married Peewee instead, passing off nasty Chip as his child.) Eventually, Sissy resolves to run away with Parker, but cynical Bourrée tells Peewee everything—and all hell breaks loose.
Adultery, incest, and fireworks aplenty in TV screenwriter Despres’s debut. But no real heat.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-17389-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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