Winning characters and piquant wit, with an underpinning of graciousness: a standout.
Charming first novel tells a familiar story—a “horribly sticky” love triangle between a professor, his student, and the wife who helped him in his college years—but transforms a potentially trite subject into a comic delight.
Cutter, 25, works two jobs, as a waitress at the Pancake Palace and as a reporter on what she calls the “dead beat,” writing obituaries for the Sans Souci Citizen. Her great-grandfather established the mill in Palmetto, but three generations later, the family fortunes have gone downhill. Cutter is mindful of the family curse: “the minute they ventured out in the world seeking love, seeking more, the women in my family found nothing but trouble.” Her beloved Gran, recently dead, had raised Cutter and her older sister and brother. Their father was lost in foreign waters in Vietnam at age 23. Three years later, their mother, “running out for a pound of sugar, a box of Ivory Snow and a pound of snap beans,” collided with a three-wheeler. Now the other siblings want to sell the family estate, and Cutter is struggling to save the house and its “dead garden,” where Gran is buried near the garden angel. Sister Ginnie is pregnant by her professor Daniel and needs money to cover her health care (or possibly an abortion). Brother Barry, who is in the Marines, wants to buy a new car. Daniel’s wife Elizabeth has her own struggles against agoraphobia and the toil of writing a dissertation on garden imagery in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Through a series of odd circumstances, Cutter and Elizabeth end up in cahoots. Their unexpected friendship holds up even after Elizabeth discovers Ginnie is pregnant. Meanwhile, Cutter finds herself smitten with Curt, her boss at the newspaper. He seduces her in a disarmingly inept love scene, but his mother, who owns the paper, will not be denied her society daughter-in-law. Cutter, Ginnie, and Elizabeth all endure enough romantic troubles to keep the plot spinning along.
Winning characters and piquant wit, with an underpinning of graciousness: a standout.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32674-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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