Screenwriter and director Conn, who adapted the film Claire of the Moon into a novel, may be too firmly entrenched in Hollywoodor so it seems in her formulaic latest. Lindsay Brennan, a lesbian, is a variation on a clichÇ: the familiar Type A personality who puts work ahead of personal life and in the process risks alienating herself from love and happiness. As the most brilliant architect ever to hit Portland, Oregon, Lindsay has made work her life for so long that her heart is frozenuntil she's introduced (by a former for-sex-only flame) to Sondra Pinchot, a 40-ish interior designer/alcoholic who's just bought the beach house of her dreams and is looking for just-the- right architect to redesign it. After a few weeks of combining work with passionweeks during which Lindsay and Sondra snag the plum job of designing the Darlington Arts PavilionSondra cracks under the pressure of her first relationship with a woman. Enter her daughter Samantha, also an interior designer (and, conveniently, stuck in an unfulfilling heterosexual relationship in Seattle), who rides in on a white horse to send her mother to rehab and take over her portion of the Pavilion joband ultimately prove herself to be Lindsay's soulmate. The supporting cast of Lindsay's assistants provides some laughsSnag is a GÇrard Depardieu-loving, hedonistic queen; and overweight, always-a-bridesmaid Megan finally meets her love matchbut finally takes up too much space in the book, possibly compensating, inadvertently, for the fact that Lindsay, Sondra, and Samantha are one-dimensional and inherently dull. The prologuea dramatic car crashconnects precariously to the conclusion, in which Conn tries, too late, to establish the notion that things aren't always what they seem. So many plot twists, so little timethe passion never truly emerges from the shadow in this convoluted, scene-obsessed production. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80326-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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