by Lydia Millet ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2008
A hymn to love and an elegy for lost species, but not much of a novel.
A story of extinction from Millet (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, 2005, etc.).
As a boy T. collects donations for charities that don’t exist and serves as middleman for schoolyard protection rackets. In college he joins a fraternity not for community but for connections, and he remains apart from the debauchery. His brothers mock his monastic tendencies, but they appreciate his clear head and powers of persuasion when, say, frat-party rape victims need to be talked out of pressing charges. As an adult T. is a real estate speculator. He has fulfilled the promise of his youth, which is to say he has achieved the apotheosis of human greed and narcissism. Events conspire, however, to disturb his cool self-interest. His father leaves his mother. His mother descends into dementia. And he hits a coyote with his very expensive car, killing it. T. becomes his mother’s caretaker. He tries to communicate with his father. He adopts a dog. He falls in love with a girl named Beth. Transformed by these connections, T. becomes passably human, but he is undone once again by Beth’s sudden death. T. sinks into an abyss of loneliness—which deepens as his mother ceases to recognize him—and his experience makes him aware of the loneliness of animals on the brink of extinction. He becomes, if not an activist exactly, then a self-sacrificing witness to these last creatures. Millet’s latest doesn’t work as a novel—it’s exhausting and disappointing. The author seldom deviates from the expository voice, and her characters exist only in outline. She does, however, offer an interesting disputation on the meaning of life, one that posits love as the only useful response to isolation, even as it acknowledges that loss is the inevitable result of communion.
A hymn to love and an elegy for lost species, but not much of a novel.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59376-184-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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