If Oliver Twist had wandered out of his orphanage and been picked up by Gus Van Sant instead of Fagin, the results might have been something like this debut novel. Even Van Sant, however—to say nothing of Dickens—would have managed to tell the story in better taste. “You probably wonder,” Johnny says, “why I’m writing a biography at age 20.— Well, no, it’s not that surprising, considering that Johnny has spent the last few years sleeping with—and making porn films for—his homosexual step-father and most of their close friends. Naturally, it’s a long story. Johnny, in actual fact, never knew his real father: his mother was a prostitute and drug addict, and when she overdosed in London’s Victoria Station, Martin Usher happened to be on the scene. Usher, known as Shamash, was a dancer and ballet director from Australia whose only son Vaslav had died in a car accident. So Shamash gives seven-year-old Johnny Vaslav’s passport and takes him to Sydney to be raised. Shamash is attentive, dutiful, and loving to the boy, but life becomes a trifle complex during Johnny’s adolescence when he decides that he wants to be gay just like Dad, and even starts to fantasize about having sex with him. Shamash is equally attracted to Johnny, so he sends him away to boarding school to put him out of temptation’s path. Guess what? They can’t hold out, and after carrying on secretly for as long as they can, they sink ever deeper into Sydney’s gay underworld. Although the plot’s unique—to say the least—the story is written in such a tortured, melodramatic tone, so completely out of keeping with the elements of the narrative (“Golden boys from yesteryear wearily dispense condoms and lube . . . should the current selection prove too grim and a few more drinks be required before carnal agendas can be met”) that all but hard-core followers of the gay scene will be quickly turned off. Strictly for a narrower audience, unless Drinnan gets lucky and finds himself denounced by Trent Lott.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19271-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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