An entirely unromantic and unapologetic ode to doing what you want when you want—to hell with the consequences.
Debut about an ambitious party girl and her borderline hustler best friend who take Europe by storm.
The two party kids, DJ and Amy, are young Brits who—after a drunken New Year’s found them both dumped and disconsolate—decide to light out for the Continent, determined to live fast, not work, and grab as much as they can in the drinking/drugging/screwing department. They tell their story in tradeoffs, DJ giving his side and Amy coming in to refute half of what he’s just said. Though friends for years, they have a rocky relationship, illustrated by the fact that the story opens with DJ fellating Amy’s current boyfriend “under the table of some stinking club in not so gay Paris.” The two of them aren’t long for Paris in any case, with DJ upset with Amy for having actually gone and taken a job, while he believes himself to be sticking to their agreement by getting his money by theft and turning tricks. Soon, they’re in Madrid, rooming with a couple of drag cabaret performers, then not much later decamping for the Auvergne, where they’re saddled with Marilyn, a screechy young college boy who will finally follow them back to Paris, selling drugs and causing a rift between Amy and DJ. The tale is an epic of supreme selfishness, with DJ barely able to comprehend that there might be things he won’t be allowed to take, men who won’t want to sleep with him, situations where he won’t get his way. Amy appears moderately more mature, but it’s fleeting. There’s little chance to catch one’s breath between all the clubbing and random hook-ups, with the British author determined to keep his characters spiraling downward into a black hole of narcissistic self-obsession until they crack (or not—it’s not a very moral sort of story).
An entirely unromantic and unapologetic ode to doing what you want when you want—to hell with the consequences.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7475-6593-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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