Repellent characters redeemed by saucy, vivid writing.
Brazenly romantic debut about a London golden-boy artist who hits the skids but redirects his wayward life with the help of a nice girl from the neighborhood
At 28, Gilver Memmer had a glittering reputation based as much on his good looks and lavish parties as on the wildly expensive paintings that made him rich. In the subsequent decade, he didn’t actually paint much but assumed that the money would last forever. It didn’t, and at 39 he can no longer afford his luxurious flat in a London mews. His college roommate Harry, a gay decorator half in love with Gilver and easily manipulated by him, finds the artist a dilapidated studio in Ladbroke Grove. Unused to doing things for himself, Gilver latches onto a pretty young working woman, Alice, who proceeds with astounding alacrity to help him clean his new flat for three days. She’s in love with him, too, but Gilver forgets about her and spends the next two years wallowing in self-pity. Alice, meantime, learns about his spectacular past from her scary, backstabbing girlfriend Juliette, a journalist who has harbored a personal grudge against Gilver for 15 years and, just as he’s about to stage a comeback, seizes the opportunity to ruin him with a vicious editorial in her scandal sheet, Rogue. British author Stockley provides all the necessary combustible elements for a devilishly entertaining narrative, including nicely salacious details of Gilver's boozy sexual escapades. In time-honored romance fashion, her darkly hubristic hero must be civilized, though American women will probably find Alice too much of a doormat. (Would an English woman really clean a strange man’s apartment without asking for anything in return?) Harry, however, is a true-blue character they can root for, and while Stockley can be catty—generally when denigrating female characters like Juliette who are ambitious and sexually driven—she is seldom glib and never dull.
Repellent characters redeemed by saucy, vivid writing.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-349-11546-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Warner UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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