An enjoyable read for fans of prep-school drama.
In this debut coming-of-age novel, a college senior gets on a plane to visit his best friend from boarding school, reminiscing along the way about their time as roommates.
Twenty-one-year-old history major Matt Derby, and firefighter Trey Daniels, 22, aren’t very compelling characters, but this novel, told in flashback, is mostly about their interesting teenage selves—specifically during their sophomore year at the not-quite-top-tier Ashford River School. Narrator Matt, a scholarship student, is a well-grounded if unsophisticated middle-class kid from Buffalo, N.Y. Trey is more knowing, attending his third prep school and hailing from a dysfunctional family with residences in Manhattan; Georgetown; Lake Placid, N.Y.; and the Bahamas. Unlike the other students, Trey doesn’t care about grades, making it to the Ivy League or even his image, which earns him Matt’s admiration. As the plot unfolds, the reader is treated to the usual endearing hijinks: the boys cheat on exams, sneak out to a “mixer” at a nearby girls’ school and carry on a steady trade in cigarettes and porn. It’s all pheromones, sweat and dirty T-shirts at Ashford, and readers may find it vaguely reminiscent of Dead Poets Society, minus the angst. There’s even a tough but kindly rowing coach; Matt and Trey are members of his crew training to compete in a regional race. First-time author Cumbo, a teacher and coach at a residential boys’ high school, knows this subject matter, and when he sticks to it, the dialogue is authentic, the pace fairly brisk and the characters sufficiently developed. When the book strays from school grounds, however, it sometimes loses its footing; the denouement, such as it is, feels pat, and the descriptions can become mired in minutiae, such as a 17-title list of the magazines on sale at an airport stand. However, most of the action recreates the intricate, intense boyhood bonds that will likely engage readers.
An enjoyable read for fans of prep-school drama.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0988208605
Page Count: 338
Publisher: One Lane Bridge
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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