Equal melodrama and farce.
No, no, not that New York Nanny—an English one. Sort of like Bridget Jones, but not so jaded, with unmistakable echoes of I Don’t Know How She Does It and other chick-lit classics.
Gather round, twentysomethings, and identify with spunky Jo Green, who leaves the peaceful village where she grew up, tired of the same old crowd at the same old pub, ready for something, anything, new. Bidding her mates and devoted boyfriend good-bye, she arrives in London, awed by the great city—but unimpressed by the beleaguered parents who hire her about a minute after their last nanny quit. Vanessa, an advertising exec, loathes all aspects of mommydom and openly prefers her clever colleagues to Dick, her henpecked husband. The Fitzgeralds indulge themselves endlessly in vicious bickering, which troubles Jo, though she soldiers on bravely nonetheless, somewhat comforted by her own suite, huge TV, and sole use of a Renault. The three adorable children are a handful, of course; and so Jo seeks advice from the other nannies, English and foreign (all accents duly noted and elaborately mocked). The young women dish on their obnoxious employers, confess to crushes on the better-looking husbands, and tell wide-eyed Jo how to wangle days off and perks such as facials and aerobic classes. Despite her devoted boyfriend’s pleading, Jo hopes to find new love with her new life. Conveniently, Josh, Dick’s grown son from a previous marriage, moves back home to (she thinks) sponge off his father. Josh breaks his leg, the two bond over heaps of ironing, and at last the truth is revealed: Dick has been unable to keep up his share of expenses, and Josh, a successful accountant, has been secretly slipping him money so dear old dad won’t incur the simmering wrath of his bitchy wife. Can the marriage be saved? Will wedding bells ring for Josh and Jo?
Equal melodrama and farce.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-056011-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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