Well into his 70s, with 50 or so books to his credit, Auchincloss (Three Lives, False Gods, etc. etc.) shows no signs of slowing down. And that's great news, because his word is as graceful and insightful as it's ever been. These eight stories, with their familiar social types and elegant settings, are vintage Auchincloss: moral tales that resonate with the history of our times, albeit from the top down. Seth Middleton, Dick Emmons, and Osborne Renwick are all wealthy, elderly men who, for one reason or another, find their cherished worldviews suddenly challenged: A retired lawyer of honor and decency cannot rescue his beloved grandson from utter despair (``The Man of Good Will''); in ``The Lotos Eaters,'' a story as clever as Kingsley Amis's Old Devils, another distinguished lawyer, widowed early in life, decides to remarry; and in the fabulistic ``Renwick Steles,'' an aging heir to a real-estate fortune realizes that he will live forever in the shadow of his perfect wife. The witty ``They That Have Power To Hurt'' is the Nabokovian memoir of a minor writer in his 70s determined to rationalize his history of sexual parasitism. The raging id of a neurasthenic tycoon in ``The Poetaster'' makes for a compelling tale of upper-class deviancy. In ```To My Beloved Wife'...,'' a wealthy matron is led astray by the false god of art (represented by an oily, Capote-like hanger-on). The romantic egoism of a once celebrated actress has left her a lonely ``virgin Queen'' in old age (``Priestess and Acolyte''). And ``A Day and Then a Night'' is the poignant story of a young man's self-doubt on the eve of US intervention in WW II. Throughout, Auchincloss's varied character studies, always subtle and sympathetic, speak directly to the quality of our lives. Ignored by most anthologists, Auchincloss belongs among the masters of American short fiction, as this volume demonstrates. His publishers should silence skeptics with a fat collection spanning his 40-plus years of story-writing.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-69132-X
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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
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