``There ought to be some kind of retribution, some way to even the score....Let's make sure they pay a price.'' These are the words of a veritable Park Avenue Medea in Goldsmith's sharp, vitriolic, funny, and exceedingly commercial debut novel—all about what happens when three abandoned society wives get mad. The wives are a little slow to cut loose because, as one of them points out, ``We are a generation of masochists.'' Besides, their divorces have laid them low. Indeed, good girl Annie Paradise still thinks she loves her soon-to-be ex, advertising-whiz Aaron, who gambled away their Down's syndrome daughter's trust fund in a bum stock deal and shacks up with—of all people—Annie's old sex- therapist. Meanwhile, her Greenwich Village pal, Elise Atchison, a faded but still beautiful movie star and fantastically wealthy heiress, puts up with the promiscuity of her ``empty suit,'' Bill, for years until—to add insult to injury—he decides to walk with an anorexically thin, cocaine-snorting performance artist. And Brenda, the wise-cracking former wife of crass, appliance-peddling millionaire Morty the Madman, takes solace in cookies and pies. But then the girls get together for lunch at Le Cirque and determine to see to it that there's justice for first wives. Their goals? ``Morty broke...Bill castrated, and Aaron abandoned''—most of which they accomplish with the help of Elise's dough, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a US senator. Along the way, they find themselves new beaux, laughs, tears, and vastly improved lives. Poor Medea never had it so good, nor do most real, down-to- earth first wives. But this is fantasy, with warm, cuddly female characters and larger-than-life, utterly villainous men. Moreover, the novel mainlines into a vein of pure bile—which can't help but produce heady effects on those millions of women who know exactly what Goldsmith's talking about. (Film rights sold to Paramount.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74693-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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