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SUBMISSION

Endlessly prying fingers aside, there’s less psychological penetration than in Pauline Réage, though the language is a good...

A scorching, affectless tale of sexual servitude that shows how little has been added in the 50 years since Story of O.

Élodie is a successful Parisian lawyer who night after night leaves her husband and son waiting at home while she meets a stern, arousing but ultimately unfulfilling master who holds her in thrall for reasons she cannot understand. Her enslavement is a study in deferred gratification. In one of their earliest encounters, her nameless partner, a professional colleague, tells her: “You’ll want to scream, but you’ll be gagged. You’ll want to cry, but you’ll be blindfolded. You’ll want to run away, but you’ll be tied up.” Promises, promises: Except for the blindfold, this never happens. Nor does Élodie ever get Him to penetrate her, at least not in the way prescribed by the marriage manuals. Instead she’s condemned to an endless round of dressing in naughty lingerie, striking humiliating poses, making rendezvous and waiting in vain for him to join her, allowing her body to be violated by His probing and her compulsive dieting, accompanying Him to parties where He flirts with other women, seducing acquaintances for His pleasure and dreading the moment when He’ll give her to some male friend. Her foreboding is thickened by a psychic who warns her that she means nothing to the man who’ll destroy her happiness, an unsatisfied desire to feel Him inside her and a growing certainty that indeed He doesn’t care for her. Yet there’s no narrative impetus to Élodie’s degrading adventures and no real consequences, not even to the extent of fulfilling the psychic’s prediction that a woman will die. The result is a pillow book of tableaux that stages a dozen perverse scenes of sexual thralldom without consummation or release.

Endlessly prying fingers aside, there’s less psychological penetration than in Pauline Réage, though the language is a good deal more frank.

Pub Date: July 9, 2005

ISBN: 0-7432-7104-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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