A malevolently thrilling coming-of-ager wrapped in a philosophical detective tale.
A research project takes a college freshman into lands of the mind and soul he never knew existed—or wants to remember.
Written in flashback by its haunted protagonist, this first outing trades in clichés but makes them somehow sing together in beautiful unison. There’s the setting of Aberdeen College, your prototypical Northeastern enclave of moneyed academia, thick with Gothic architecture and privilege, where “the tang of New England countryside has seeped into your skin . . . [where] it will remain, tendrils of ivy forever enshrouding your limbs.” There’s the narrator, Eric Dunne, 16 and on an academic scholarship that’s rescued him from his foster family and New Jersey, who is introduced to the joys of full-time study, the mystery of death and the pinch of unrequited love. Then there’s the story, as young Eric is roped into a research project run by Dr. Cade, one of the bright lights of Aberdeen and working on a history of the Middle Ages, which a coterie of students mostly writes for him. The other students, Art, Howie and Dan, are a high-functioning band of misfit geniuses ensconced in Dr. Cade’s remote old house, getting stinking drunk when they aren’t arguing over esoteric details of philosophy or decoding dusty history texts for the project. Eric knows from the get-go that all isn’t as it seems at Aberdeen, of course, what with the librarian he’s been assigned to appearing to be 150 years old (and insane to boot), and Dr. Cade’s other assistants being engaged in mysterious alchemical research. Add to all this the fact that Eric’s out of his skull in love with Art’s smashingly gorgeous and fiercely intelligent girlfriend and you’ve got the makings for Nathan’s dark concoction. Plenty here is just writerly show-off—mood-setting and plumbing the depths of Eric’s loneliness-ravaged, ultra-intelligent soul—but sometimes that’s more than enough for any one novel.
A malevolently thrilling coming-of-ager wrapped in a philosophical detective tale.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5082-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
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