Classy stuff that deserves tons of flowers from dazed and satisfied readers.
Laugh-out-loud debut fiction by a four-time Emmy winner and humorist (Merrill Markoe’s Guide to Love, 1997, etc.).
An art teacher writes annual reports on her birthday so she won’t be condemned to repeat her screwed-up life. Her entries run from thirty f**king six to fortymmmmppphhh. There is no way she can avoid her ghastly parents, a mother who makes her cringe in restaurants (“ . . . maybe the waiters and waitresses will think I am [Dad’s] child by a previous marriage”), and a father who gives excruciatingly detailed orders to busboys (“Listen to me carefully so I don’t have to eat my lunch soaking wet . . . . If you don’t hold that pitcher with two hands how the hell do you expect to get any directional stability when you pour?”). “So these were my parents, the people put on earth to judge me, to advise me, to correct me, to mold me in their image.” Each birthday the teacher’s painfully boorish ex-boyfriend Carl sends her an oversized birthday bouquet of seasonal flowers—and each birthday she has high hopes that this year the dumb girl in her will finally die. Can she stay out of the Hole where divorcées and singles in the their late 30s and beyond sit whining to each other that they haven’t had sex in four years? She has really, really, really bad sex with a guy in her acting class who has no idea at all where anything is on a woman. “If he wired a car the same way he made love, the windows would open and close when he pressed on the accelerator.” For her thirty f**king eighth birthday, her parents take her out. When Dad triumphantly spots a 72-cent error in the bill, calls the waiter, then the manager, Mother swells, as proud of her man as if he’d pulled her from a burning building.
Classy stuff that deserves tons of flowers from dazed and satisfied readers.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50712-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
