Freely's latest satirical look (after the darkly comic Mother's Helper, 1979; and The Life of the Party, 1984) at modern American moms and dads—this one featuring a bumbling househusband whose marriage is destroyed by his wife's gaggle of terrifying friends. They were young, they were in love, and then they made the twin mistakes of settling into a progressive San Francisco community among rabidly procreating veterans of 60's communes, English departments, and medical schools, and themselves giving birth to not one but two kids of their own. While pregnant with their first—as Mike notes in this booklength confessional letter to Laura, his long-absent wife—they managed to laugh off such questions from fellow birth-class members as ``How many of you people are planning to confine your children inside the bars of a crib?'' But another child and a difficult birth later, Laura's no longer laughing as Mike trips out the front door to pursue his legal career—while she, also a law school graduate, stays home with the kids, the fires of her resentment stoked by the lunatic if ultra-politically-correct members of her mothers' support group. The pressure builds until Mike agrees to stay home himself in an attempt to save his marriage—but this new arrangement only leaves him open to increasingly intimate and neurotic entanglements with Laura's friends. Moved to sympathy and even affection for Charlotte, whose deadbeat husband is about to be audited by the IRS; Ophelia, whose spouse has been sleeping with every female in sight; and Becky, who must constantly overcome the shameful disadvantage of never having graduated from college, Mike attempts to comfort his fellow support group members in the only way he knows how—until his sexual juggling act is revealed, causing a domestic earthquake whose tremors shake up the households of all concerned and that leaves Mike a sadder, if wiser, solitary man. Wickedly funny. (Film rights to Francis Ford Coppola)
Pub Date: June 29, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41154-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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