A sitcom with heart, and a whole lot of fun.
A wimp travels the rocky road to empowerment in the Massachusetts author’s fourth novel.
Medwed, who struck romantic-comic gold with Mail (1997) and Host Family (2000), is an insistently friendly writer who chats frequently with the reader while voicing her protagonist (and narrator) Abigail Randolph’s hopes, fears and recriminations. Abby is 33, divorced from faithless Clyde, still mourning the death of her mother in an earthquake in India (whence mom had fled with her female lover Henrietta, materfamilias of the Randolphs’ best friends and Cambridge academic-circle neighbors), involved only with the antique shop whose name—A. & C. Eclectibles—keeps reminding her of the vanished Clyde. Abby’s fortunes change when a chamberpot relinquished to her by former girlhood pal Lavinia (Henrietta’s daughter) is identified as the one-time property of poet E.B. Browning (Abby appears on TV’s Antiques Roadshow, and becomes a minor celebrity). This brings out the worst in superefficient martinet Lavinia, who sues for possession of the chamberpot, thus dredging up memories of Abby’s shattered romance with Lavinia’s dreamy brother Ned, who had sworn eternal love, then revealed all Abby’s failures and embarrassments in a crummy autobiographical novel. Abby sulks, overeats, vegetates, wades through legal niceties and intricacies, has an ill-advised fling with a straight-out-of-GQ news reporter, survives the deposition at which she faces down Lavinia and re-encounters repentant Ned, then makes another serendipitous “find,” and emerges—to her amazement—not only unscathed, but happy, for God’s sake. It’s all fairly frothy, and rather overloaded with wisecracks and breathless successions of rhetorical questions. But Medwed briskly depicts the odd world of flea markets and tag sales, and makes of Abby’s arduous liberation (not unlike the invalid Browning’s) an adventure to which Jane Austen might have raised a celebratory glass of port.
A sitcom with heart, and a whole lot of fun.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-083119-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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
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