Despite the brittle dialogue (often very funny), there’s a you-betcha optimism at the heart of this winning tale. Landvik...
A flamboyant Broadway actress helps out her sister by caring for her nephew—a Down syndrome teenager—for a month.
Geneva Jordan has just discovered she’s not the center of the universe after all. Her run in a hit musical has ended, and she’s been jilted by her lover, co-star Trevor, a studly British actor with a penchant for ingénues. What to do but sulk and moan? She might as well help out her mousy sister Ann, who’s begging her to watch her 13-year-old son Richard so Ann can take a long-overdue vacation with her husband. Geneva reluctantly agrees, happy to get away from Trevor and his latest wide-eyed conquest. Flaunting lots of New York attitude, she descends upon her sister’s modest house outside Minneapolis—and soon she and Rich are best buddies, sharing good times and talking over old ones. And that’s when Rich brings out the book Geneva and her sister made years ago—THE GREAT MYSTERIOUS. Using a Cheerios box for the cover and construction paper pockets for the pages, the young girls posed the Big Questions about life, love, and God to one and all. The contributors: their practical dad, freethinking mom, earnest Grandma Hjordis, and, naturally, the sisters themselves. As she reads, Geneva realizes that the answers hold more meaning than ever—and many surprises. An even better surprise: the irresistibly down-to-earth James, single father of one of Rich’s playmates. A mailman by choice, and a gifted pianist as well, James’s wry wit and sturdy Minnesota virtues make him more appealing than pseudo-sophisticated Trevor, who has the effrontery to beg Geneva to come back when the ingénue moves on. Geneva must choose, and choose she does.
Despite the brittle dialogue (often very funny), there’s a you-betcha optimism at the heart of this winning tale. Landvik (The Tall Pine Polka, 1999, etc.) takes a less self-consciously wacky approach and should reach a wider readership this time around.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-43881-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
