A little short on resounding depth but, still, a promising debut.
Part erotic exposé, part portrait of a dead-end life, Gibbon’s slim first novel maintains a striking balance between the sacred and the profane.
Evangeline, a senior in high school, has little to look forward to but the sexual encounters she shares with her boyfriend, Del (and her best friends, June and Ray, who occupy either the front or back seat of the car). Told in explicit detail, Vangie and Del's relationship, sexual as well as romantic, serves as the paradigm for life in their small Pennsylvania town—violent, claustrophobic, and desperate. When graduation arrives, the two couples indirectly part ways: Vangie and Del rent a small house together, and June and Ray move in with Ray's older brother, Luke. Working at a chicken ranch, waitressing at a roughneck restaurant, picking fruit—backbreaking labor—at an orchard: Vangie's jobs offer a searing portrait of the bleak nature of manual labor, where her only respite is an evening of sex and getting high before the next day of work begins. Her public life, however, serves only as a minor chord. It is Vangie and Del’s private relationship that provides the storyline as love and violence grow between the two. Often drunk, Del urges Vangie to sexual extremes, which both satisfies her and assuages her shame at having slept with Del's brother and then June's brother. Into her own guilty entanglements comes June's revelation that she is not only sleeping with Ray but also with Luke, the outcome of which provides a brutal and poignant conclusion. Bleak and graphic in its realism, Swimming succeeds in keeping the reader’s attention (though this may have more to do with voyeuristic titillation than any true momentum built), providing, if not enjoyment, at least interest in the lives depicted.
A little short on resounding depth but, still, a promising debut.Pub Date: May 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-30599-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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