Occasionally funny and touching but, overall, a disappointment.
A glum tale of love lost and then haphazardly regained in middle age.
Lee is happy enough with her lot in life as the proud wife of a small-town history professor, mother of three grown children, contentedly rooted in the house she was raised in. But with the small-press publication of her memoir about traveling with her extraordinary grandmother, Lee begins to fret over the past, especially that London summer she met Simon and experienced first love—maybe, she realizes unsettlingly all these years later, her only true love. This is a sticky situation for a happily married woman, but how happy is she really? Lee begins to consider her safe choices: staying put in Maine, marrying stolid Ben very shortly after her parents’ accidental death, becoming the ever-helpful cheerleader to her husband’s never-finished study of a dull Maine lumberjack, and of course suppressing the reckless passion she felt for Simon. Much of the story travels back to Lee and Simon’s meeting, their parting and pledging of eternal love, and the one-night stand they had in their 30s, when Lee and Ben spent an academic summer abroad in London. To the novel’s detriment, Lee’s tale makes a pale footnote to her memories of Grandmother Marguerite, a memorable beauty and a real grande dame, bejeweled, adulterous, and spoiled, feasting on the banquet of life. Part of Lee’s problem, we quickly see, is that she feels small under Marguerite’s consuming shadow, but that insight doesn’t help the plot much. Now 50 and increasingly obsessed with Simon, Lee manages a trip to England to see whether the real man can live up to the exalted memory. And if he does, then what? The talented Medwed, author of two endearingly witty previous novels (Host Family, 2000, etc.), has lost her timing this go-round, with a sad heaviness and some not particularly funny jokes replacing her former comic charm.
Occasionally funny and touching but, overall, a disappointment.Pub Date: June 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53079-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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