The melodrama of romantic intrigue is this novel’s driving force.
Part international thriller, part romantic soap opera and less satisfying than the author’s previous works.
The third novel from the India-born, Maryland-based professor of mathematics (The Age of Shiva, 2008, etc.) deals with all sorts of schisms: between Hindus and Muslims, India and Pakistan, spiritual and secular. But the main battle here is sexual, a romantic triangle to which one party is oblivious throughout most of the novel, climaxing in purple prose that American readers might associate with a bodice ripper but in the land of the burqa. “Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy,” gushes Sarita, one of the novel’s co-narrators, the bride whose explosive consummation apparently makes the delay worth the frustration, despite the complication apparently necessary to arouse her husband’s ardor. “The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands—only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei.” In other words, an apparently successful reunion with her physicist husband, who disappeared mysteriously on the eve of a rumored atomic attack by Pakistan on India, sparking genocidal violence between the Hindu and Muslim populations of the author’s native Mumbai. As she announces early on, “the sole imperative in my mind was to find Karun, or risk everything trying.” Most of the novel details that increasingly dangerous quest, through a narrative interspersed with various flashbacks to the courtship of Sarita, a statistician past 30 when she meets her future husband, the sexually ambivalent Karun. Early on, she acquires a companion and accomplice, and the novel a co-narrator: a handsome cosmopolitan of Muslim origin who shares her goal—“Karun, whom I must find, whom I need to dazzle, whose rectitude I hope to penetrate”—though the passion of the “the Jazter” (as he calls himself) for her husband remains secret from Sarita.
The melodrama of romantic intrigue is this novel’s driving force.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-08875-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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