A promising first outing for Pritzker, who maintains a steady stream of humor in this breezy diversion.
Pritzker’s debut offering is a tongue-in-cheek novella in which family secrets are closely guarded behind upper-class pretensions.
This tale opens with the prestigious Harwood family scion, John James, presiding over the traditional Thanksgiving feast. Seated at the table with him are his two daughters, Tanya and Amy, his second wife, Sophia, his sister Victoria, her husband, Victor, and family matriarch Granny Clarissa. As barbs fly across the table, Uncle Victor is suddenly stricken, falling dead on the floor. It seems he has been poisoned. In the ensuing hours, a carefully varnished exterior of civility is torn away, and two decades of betrayal are revealed. Pritzker has plenty of fun with her skewering of the Harwoods, who made their fortune when Clarissa’s grandfather Augustus, a glass blower, found a way to manufacture superior glass eyes. With the burgeoning need for his product during and after two world wars, the family’s place at the top of their town’s social ladder was secured. As is appropriate for such an illustrious family, the real battles are about money, inheritance, and positions of power. Which of John James’ two children—Tanya, daughter of his beloved and tragically departed first wife, or Amy, daughter of his current wife—will be tapped to carry forward the Harwood legacy? What has Granny been up to? And, by the way, who in this den of vipers killed Victor? What’s puzzling in this satire about lineage, however, is that Pritzker is a bit careless in defining Granny’s back story in an otherwise well-constructed, if occasionally predictable, romp. Augustus Harwood was her grandfather, yet she was married to John Harwood Sr. How was the Harwood name passed down to her husband? There’s a reference to mysterious scandals involving Augustus—was there some unsavory Harwood-Harwood liaison somewhere along the line? This issue is unfortunately never addressed. It’s an irksome omission, especially since Granny is a pivotal character devoted to the preservation of the Harwood dynasty. Nevertheless, the skillful narration smoothly moves the story forward at a good clip, seamlessly interweaving present events with individual back stories.
A promising first outing for Pritzker, who maintains a steady stream of humor in this breezy diversion.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692268155
Page Count: 74
Publisher: Serealities Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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