Very appealing, but more mature insights don’t entirely compensate for the fact that both heroine and storyline greatly...
Another engaging, ruefully funny saga of a young woman growing up without ever quite fitting in, from the author of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999).
Sophie Applebaum introduces herself to us en route from her home in suburban Philadelphia to a cousin’s bat mitzvah. At 12, she's already witty, mildly insecure and determined in her aimless way not to do anything she doesn’t want to. These character traits will be familiar to Bank’s previous readers, and the author again favors the interlinked-stories format as she drops in on Sophie at various life-defining moments. “Boss of the World” sketches out the family dynamic: quiet, much-loved father; anxious, hectoring mother; unreliable but charming big brother Jack; follow-the-rules little brother Robert, and Sophie in the middle, vaguely discomfited by them all. In subsequent stories/chapters, she drifts through a mediocre college, makes something of an effort to land a job in publishing (actually learning to type), negotiates complex friendships with women usually more assured than she, and meets any number of Mr. Wrongs, who range from self-absorbed to philandering to nice-enough-but-not-The-One. (That constitutes progress for Sophie.) Robert marries aggressively orthodox Naomi; Jack flits from woman to woman before settling down with a well-connected real estate agent—“he would work to be part of Mindy's family as he’d never worked to be part of our family,” his sister comments sardonically. After her father’s death, Sophie grows more tender toward her mother, acknowledging their shared vulnerability. She even learns to love her maternal grandmother, once critical and difficult but considerably softened by a stroke and an impending date with the Grim Reaper. Though the Applebaums all get off plenty of good wisecracks, the overall tone here is faintly melancholy. The last snapshot is of a 40ish Sophie, who has a new job and a decade-younger boyfriend, but isn't exactly dancing in the aisles.
Very appealing, but more mature insights don’t entirely compensate for the fact that both heroine and storyline greatly resemble their predecessors in Bank’s bestselling debut.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03411-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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