Russell (Boys of Life, 1991) limns his family drama's main themes with masterful strokes, although the rest of the canvas pales in comparison. Allen Cloud is a fine astronaut but a lousy husband and father; he can make it to the moon, but can't go the distance in his marriage. Oblivious to his wife Joan's unhappiness (and alcoholism), flustered by her decision to leave, and shaken by her suspicion that their son Jonathan is gay, he lets them drift out of his life in Houston to a small town in Tennessee. While Joan slips deeper into alcoholism, Jonathan revels in his homosexuality, wholeheartedly embracing life and just about every man who comes his way. In Tennessee, he elicits the passion of a repressed preacher's son, with painful and long-ranging consequences. Jonathan is at once the linchpin and the squeaky wheel of this novel, a ridiculously precocious high school student at the outset who continues to be the magical, mystical center around which everyone's life seems to revolve at the conclusion more than 20 years later. Yet the precocity and wit designed to make Jonathan special are rather overused traits in contemporary gay fiction, which may be why the other characters always seem more in awe of him than the reader is. And the action slows badly and loses credibility when mother and son decide to move to Turkey and live, most conveniently, on insurance money long untouched. Despite these weaknesses, there is some breathtaking writing here. Russell weaves a web of personal relationships subtly and expertly, teasing out in the process human truths that shock and satisfy. This orchestration comes to a gratifying and occasionally bittersweet climax at the novel's close, when Jonathan's fate becomes almost incidental to the positive effects he's wrought, albeit often painfully, in others' lives. A worthwhile if somewhat bumpy ride through 20 years of one remarkable family's life. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93895-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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