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FEARLESS

Writing very smartly indeed but no better or worse than in his largely well-received Hot Properties, The Murderer Next Door, etc., Yglesias achieves by sheer dint of an inspired story what may be his breakthrough novel (already optioned for a Peter Weir film starring Jeff Bridges and Isabella Rossellini). This time out, he tells of a magical change of character in the survivor of a runway air-crash. First-rate but unfulfilled architect Max Stein becomes really alive, fearless of all constraints, and sets out to trim all the deadwood out of his life and stand dripping with dew in the early lilacs. This lightning bolt of alienation from society or estrangement from mankind is a state of mind much enjoyed by Tolstoy's heroes, and with that plot and a man back from the dead, Yglesias can do anything and it will be as fresh as a visiting Martian's first hot dog with mustard. Unhappily married fellow survivor Carla Fransisca blames herself for losing her infant in the crash and becomes housebound and fearful of the streets. Enter superhonest, worry-free Max to bring her back to life, telling her, ```We're safe because we died already....You've passed through death. You're alive now. Both of us are. All of the survivors are. Don't you see? Everybody else'— he gestured at the streets, at the people hurrying to their destination, hunched against the cold, scurrying with the fear of hunted mice—`they don't know what it is to die in their minds as we did.''' Meanwhile, Max and Carla are hounded by their mutual lawyer, Brillstein, who hopes to wring a huge settlement from the airline—though neither Max nor Carla will make it easy for him with lies about the crash. Also, Max's wife Debbie, long-suffering through the ordeal of her husband's manic honesty, weighs having him committed and saved from overrich fearlessness. Smells like a wonderful story that should enjoy huge word of mouth.

Pub Date: April 8, 1993

ISBN: 0-446-51723-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993

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A LITTLE LIFE

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. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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