An amusing though featherweight romp through the English countryside, this time pitting the love for husband against love for manor house, with predictable results. Young and lovely Sonia, the Lady Duntan, is an enviable superwoman—she has four energetic children, a houseful of dogs, a career as an artist, the lovable Minnie, who tends to the children and meals, and, finally, the breathtaking ancestral home of her husband. And, in truth, much of the guilty delight in this debut novel comes from the vicarious thrill delivered by Sheepshanks's description of such an idyllic life. There's a serpent in this Eden, however, in the form of husband Archie. Though not a bad chap, Archie refuses to support Sonia's dreams of restoring the old house, which is literally crumbling down around the family and is too costly to maintain. Archie's stubbornness, coupled with his not-so-clandestine affair with torrid neighbor Rosie, has Sonia ready to wage war. Thrown into the battle is Archie's gold-digging, globe-trotting mother, who has decided to claim the house as a refuge for her newest interest, the cult-like Brotherhood of Love. Sonia's last hope is the Heritage at Risk Foundation, an organization that may be willing to pay for repairs if the house is opened to the public. Woven through Sheepshanks's leisurely descriptions of country life from village vicar to arrangements for the shooting season, is the record of Sonia's burgeoning romance with the Foundation's director. The story ends with a hammer-and- nails description of the Duntan house restoration, along with the happy voices of children in the background. An enjoyably insubstantial look at the British upper crust and its desperate attempts to keep its houses together, both literally and figuratively.
Pub Date: June 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14394-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
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
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