Twenty slight, acerbic stories in which middle-class Chicagoans—old, young, gay, married, parents of children and grown children themselves—search for slender proof that they're loved. Written by a poet who's also the author of Plain Grief (1991), etc. In the first half, Chernoff's imagination tends to be ironic, even sour, rather than intimate or empathetic. In the opening story, ``Jury Duty,'' ``I'' am a writer who bases a character on a lesbian acquaintance who's decided to get pregnant; and I'm so irritated when her life diverges from my story that I resolve to rewrite the story and have her murdered by her lover. In ``The Stockholm Syndrome,'' my old friend, a 60-year-old widow ``with one breast, a woman anyone would call matronly,'' runs away with a man she's met on vacation, leaving her house to her staid, slothful son and his new gay lover. In ``Keys,'' another of my 60-something widowed friends is dying of cancer but isn't on speaking terms with her daughter and grandson, her only living relatives—so when she wins a cheap prize of a stuffed elephant, she asks me to give it to her grandson, but not before telling me a mean, minimal story about her daughter's taste in keychains. And in the title story, a wife having an affair decides to tell her husband (also having an affair) that she knows of his affair and doesn't care—that is, unless the husband responds by telling her she's generous, in which case ``I'll ask him to leave. If he knows enough to be quiet, maybe I'll let him stay.'' In later stories, affections are slightly more developed in the texture of real life and less emblematic and tart, but still—as in ``Kabuki Everything,'' the best piece here, about two friends comforting each other—they are ruled by quirks and random happenstance. A dry, somewhat academic sensibility is at work here—one that will probably not be to every reader's taste.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79812-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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