Newcomer Bokat sketches her characters with broad strokes, and though sometimes her pen slips into caricature, predominantly...
A 1990s woman is torn between her family and her career, and fills it with compassion, good humor, and an abundance of angst.
Eve Sterling is a 30-year-old academic with a passion for Jane Austen and not much else. Having recently broken up with her boyfriend, she’s content to sit at home alone, mostly contemplating her dissertation, until a friend in desperation sets her up on a blind date. Hart, a commercial photographer, is nothing like the men she usually goes out with (academics, with a few poets mixed in), but they both soon fall head over heels and begin seriously contemplating marriage. Of course, fate intervenes, and Eve becomes pregnant. Suddenly she must learn to envision herself not only as a wife but a parent—when, without warning, her academic adviser dismisses her work as “trivial.” And her mother, an overbearing Dr. Ruth–like therapist, reveals some of her daughter’s deepest secrets on national television, pushing Eve into a deep, dark psychological abyss. She escapes to London, abandoning Hart (now her husband) and her newborn daughter, Gemma, in the hopes of finding herself. Bokat reinforces Eve’s sense of confusion by cleverly alternating between her personal letters and the main storyline. Eve eventually returns to the States, yet the author does not quite fall victim to the desire to create a conventional happy ending, leaving most of her people’s lives somewhat in flux. Eve may never be able to resolve her internal and interpersonal pressures, but the author, through her deft usage of Jane Austen quotes throughout the text, makes us realize these are not problems restricted to the contemporary woman.
Newcomer Bokat sketches her characters with broad strokes, and though sometimes her pen slips into caricature, predominantly they’re finely drawn with humor, sensitivity, and a dash of chutzpah. A fine debut.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57962-064-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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