Next book

OFFSEASON

A first novel from the editor of the Women on Women series: an earnest tale of doomed lesbian love in a wonderfully rendered out- of-season Paris setting. Holoch's story takes place over a wintery week in the Paris that exists after the tourists have gone home and the cold has driven the boulevardiers indoors. The days are short, the streets empty, and the mood dark, which makes the city a fitting backdrop for a poignant love affair that can't last. Miriam, a translator of French novels, has impulsively flown to Paris to check up on her longtime friend, Italian-born Gabriella. Usually a regular correspondent, Gabriella has stopped writing, and Miriam worries (she's overly sensitive and does this a lot) that something is wrong. She's been in love—so far unrequited—with Gabriella since the two met in New York, when Gabriella and her husband Carlo were both teaching at Columbia. Now, like the knight-errant Gabriella teasingly suggests she resembles, Miriam feels she may have to rescue Gabriella from Carlo. The couple have had a long-troubled and bitter relationship and are currently separated: Gabriella working in Paris, Carlo in New York, and their three young daughters being cared for by relatives in Marseilles. As the week passes, Miriam (who narrates) describes the brief but intensely erotic affair she now has with Gabriella and somberly recalls her past visits to Paris, her previous lovers, and her own mother's death. But the terrible secrets Gabriella confesses to, as well as Gabriella's still confused feelings for Carlo, who wants the family together again, persuade Miriam that their affair is doomed. Angry and unhappy, she leaves Paris knowing that once back in New York her ``memories would be like so many aching bruises, unpredictably and erratically sensitive.'' A rather stiff and unconvincing debut: Holoch's lovers never quite come alive or glow as the City of Light does, even in this dark time of year.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1998

ISBN: 0-571-19922-4

Page Count: 230

Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 32


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 32


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

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

Categories:
Close Quickview