An intriguing tale of sexual revelation too keen on delivering teachable moments.
A young woman leaves the rural Midwest to become an international model and struggles to heal a deep emotional wound.
In this debut novel, Lucy Pilgrim is born and raised in Iowa and longs to escape her parochial environs to see the world. She attends the University of Iowa but seizes an opportunity to work as a fashion model in New York City, an experience that proves humiliating. Bill Zabub, the head of a prominent agency, suggests that she lose 20 pounds on an achingly prohibitive diet. Lucy finishes college and weds Vic, ‘the man she had decided it logical to marry.' Lucy travels to Japan to try her luck at modeling yet again and strikes up a torrid relationship with Julien, an affair she confesses to Vic, much to his horror. She eventually moves back to the United States and attempts to repair her fractured marriage, but her relationship with Vic ends in an acrimonious divorce. On her way to Barcelona to look for work as a model, Lucy stops in Paris to see Julien, hoping to rekindle their romance, but is disappointed to learn he doesn’t equally reciprocate her affections. Maili effectively captures the vulnerability of women to male predation—Lucy seems to constantly fend off the advances of boorishly presumptuous men and is still haunted by the traumatic memory of her grandfather’s sexual assault. But the entire soap-operatic tale seems to ponderously grasp for some lesson to impart, though which one is never obvious. In addition, the prose is by turns didactic and wooden: “Are you suggesting that I don’t do what I really want to do in case my husband might have an affair while I do?” Like the novel’s protagonist, the author traveled the world as a model, and her knowledge of the industry is irreproachable. But Maili’s story would have been more powerful if she had just painstakingly described that peculiar cosmos rather than so laboriously mining it for articulable wisdom.
An intriguing tale of sexual revelation too keen on delivering teachable moments.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9996631-0-3
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Chez Soi Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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