Octogenarian West (The Lovers, 1993, etc.) shows that his veins still run with fictive silver as he returns to the problems of manic-depression he limned in his 1983 novel about Jung, The World is Made of Glass. West's 26th novel demonstrates his genius for detail: Each story-heavy page also carries engrossing (and relevant) arcana on the fine arts, high finance, and psychology. Genius financier Larry Lucas, who burns brightly but masks dark depths, vanishes, having pulled off a $5 billion deal for Strassberger & Company in New York. Married to the daughter of Emil Strassberger, his boss, and the father of two children, Larry suffers from a mood disorder and has chosen to quit the company and his marriage while at the peak of his career—entering what artists call the ``vanishing point'' in rendering perspective. Larry's artist brother-in-law Carl, meanwhile, is called home from his French village to seek out the lost Larry. The search carries Carl back to France and then on to Italy and Switzerland, as well as deep into the toils of international finance. Larry has surrendered his considerable fortune and his Strassberger bonds to a financier who funds a shady travel service that helps people disappear and start new lives. By the time Carl finally faces Larry at a Jungian hospital in Zurich, he has also faced a number of devious and violent characters, been duped and almost destroyed by a crushingly intelligent villain, and sampled a smorgasbord of sex and great cuisine in fabulous hotels along the way. Also enviable: West's photographic eye for scene-setting, buildings, and European landscape, not to mention human appearances. Only his whetstoned dialogue at times bulks up with space-saving, informational rather than dramatic cadences—but few will care. Amazing cultural grasp from a writer who seems to have been born knowing everything. (International author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-101069-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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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