A gently hortatory tale set in England's Yorkshire and various suburbs from the '40s to the '70s, dealing with the progress of two cousins, one domestic and home-loving, the other an energetic career woman. Along the way, this British author muses on the briefcase/bassinet decision, marriage, and on old ways, old places, old loyalties. Nell was raised by rough-hewn, hardworking Yorkshire farmer Uncle George and his wife Liz, along with cousins Derek and loveable Chrissie. As a child, she'd harbored a dream of a house of her own, to be shared with her widower father, an alcoholic. It was a dream much deferred, however, and then gone forever when her father died in London. Eventually Nell was taken under the doughty wing of her great-aunt Thorpe, a headmistress, and, excelling in her studies, was on her way to an academic career, determined never to marry. Meanwhile, Chrissie, married to kind engineer Jack, seems destined for domesticity and motherhood. (Her dream—to train as a nurse—was discouraged early on by her well-meaning parents.) So Nell, now a professor of sociology at a new university, is content with work and occasional affairs—until she meets and falls in love with writer Gregory. She feels, oddly, ``married,'' buys a house, thinks of a baby. Then into the lives of both women come disillusionment and a crumbling of certainties. Chrissie, her children grown, confronts the empty nest: ``If she could now achieve nothing, she was nothing.'' Also Jack, after decades of loyalty to his firm, is casually shed. Nell, also reeling from betrayal, joins Chrissie in hunting for some new source of hope. And amid the modern ticky-tacky replacing the venerable dwellings of Yorkshire, Nell does in fact find a kind of peace. A quiet tale, with considerable muttering about physical and political change, but with pleasant people who generate a mild interest.
Pub Date: July 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14419-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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