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CALIFORNIA ANGEL

Veering off the fast track of vigilante police thrillers, Rosenberg (Mitigating Circumstances, 1992, etc.) spins a cloying tale of supernatural do-gooding. Wispy, nurturing Toy Johnson, a schoolteacher to ruffian kids in Santa Ana, Calif., champions the underprivileged; she is especially fond of children (the sicker the better), not only because she has the empathy of a martyr, but because she and her wealthy but selfish doctor husband, Stephen, are infertile. Toy went into cardiac arrest once in her youth, so her system is delicate. When she finally leaves her insensitive spouse, the strain prompts another cardiac episode while she is visiting Manhattan. A friend brings her to the hospital, and the perturbed Stephen jets to her bedside, but Toy, feeling much better once conscious, escapes to the streets of New York, where she has a narcoleptic attack. When she awakens in the hospital, she is furious to find that a pacemaker has been installed. She fears the device will prevent her from saving the lives of needy children— you see, during her near-death experiences, Toy has been magically transported to the sides of kids around the country in crises (autism, kidnapping, etc.) from which she rescues them. Nobody believes her, of course: Her husband thinks she is batty, and the police, who have captured Toy on videotape saving a child from a fire, accuse her of arson and kidnapping. The kids she has rescued band together for a courtroom climax in the treacly format of a second-rate made-for-TV movie. Rosenberg, whose strength in past books has been her confrontation of violence and unpleasantness, here goes out of her way to be nice, and the button-pushing righteousness for which she is also known doesn't work in a story that utterly lacks conflict. Her loyal readers will likely jump ship. (Literary Guild featured alternate selection; author tour)

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1995

ISBN: 0-525-93945-8

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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