In his debut novel, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1991), Bartlett explored contemporary gay themes in a shadowy fable-like setting. Here, the background is richly specific—London in the 1920s and '50s—and the subject, treated with a moody obsessiveness reminiscent of Ruth Rendell (in her Barbara Vine mode), is the repression and secrecy then intrinsic to most homosexual lives. The narrator is Mr. Page, a middle-aged clerk who, alone in his tiny flat on Christmas Eve, 1956 (when arrests for sodomy are filling the headlines), tries to capture on paper, in precise detail, the turning point of his life: his encounter with Clive Vivian during the winter of 1924. The two 20-year-olds meet as strangers on Jermyn Street, where shabby Page, a junior employee at Selfridge's, visits the Turkish baths. Well-dressed Clive is the heir to a famous mansion on Brooke Street, but the two men look remarkably alike and immediately, silently, recognize their shared ``situation.'' The subject is never discussed; Page comes to the mansion for a party, then tea, only to find the great house uncared-for and Clive alternately friendly, rude, mysterious. Finally, after Clive appears to have a breakdown of sorts at his 21st-birthday dinner, Page returns to the house once more—and realizes, when he catches a glimpse of Clive and his young blond servant, that Clive is about to choose passion and honesty over society's approval. Despite a tone and pace that suggest suspense, Page's churning reminiscences don't build up to a genuine surprise or revelation; the novel fizzles out a bit as its rather didactic shape becomes apparent. But Bartlett's storytelling gifts are amply confirmed here—thanks to expertly voiced narration (Page's prim restraint giving way to occasional bursts of sarcasm or erotic fantasy) and to a masterly evocation of time and place, with the house on Brooke Street an effective symbol of Victorian values in disarray.
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-525-94273-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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