Delbanco, author of the Sherbrookes trilogy (Possession, Sherbrookes, Stillness), here offers a second collection of intelligent but surfacey stories (About My Table, 1983), all concerning writers (mostly male) who must accommodate their illusions to reality. Of the nine pieces, the best is "The Day's Catch," a novella: David Levin, the protagonist, a writer who lives on Martha's Vineyard as companion to a blind boy, is concerned with voice—"the play of utterance—its registered timbre and range." By story's end, Levin, middle-aged, and his wife attempt to recapture their marriage on a Caribbean island, but Levin "had used up their story." The effective title story describes the coming-of-age of callow Mark Fusco, "enrolled in the school of real life"; after a publication party for his successful novel, a train accident spoils his literary illusions—but the analysis of those illusions becomes his subject. Of the rest: in "You Can Use My Name," three Iowa Writers' Workshop grads keep in touch for years, until, finally, Adam sees famous Richard in dissipation, and former lover Marian as "one chatty woman, spooning fruit." Likewise, "Palinurus" concerns a famous novelist and his lesser patron, a "writer who teaches" and who becomes the novelist's literary executor, subordinating his own life to the needs of executorship. "His Masquerade" concerns a professor unexpectedly moved by a mediocre but sincere visiting poet; in "The Brass Ring," a mid-life novelist of limited reputation sees a younger brother suffer through a bout with Guillain-Barr‚ syndrome; "Everything" is modified stream-of-consciousness about a writer near the end of his life as he waits to be photographed. The metaphor of the writer writing can wear thin, but, still, this is a solid—if specialized—collection about the disillusions and small epiphanies of the literary life.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1989
ISBN: 0688047327
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1989
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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