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WHAT KEEPS ME HERE

A BOOK OF STORIES

Brown has published novels and short fiction, but her special strength seems to be the short story, as this, her third collection (The Gifts of the Body, 1994, etc.), suggests. The ten haunting pieces collected here apply a gothic surrealism to the commonplace matters of the heart. The level of abstraction in Brown's poetic fictions carries a continental air. A short piece, ``Someone Else,'' is little more than a prose poem about the self and the desire to obliterate it. The much longer ``Aqua Series'' also concerns self-identity: An artist strips away years of paint from all her canvases to discover herself at the core of all of her work. But for all her philosophic inclinations, Brown can also stir the blood: ``Faith'' pulsates with the mystery and anxiety of waiting for one's number to be called; the act of removing a pot from the wheel segues into a chilling fantasy of a scalping in ``A Severing''; and in the title piece, an almost Clive Barkerish vignette, the narrator describes the awful device that keeps her captive. The ghost of Hawthorne lurks in ``A Mark,'' a tale of two lovers and the scar that threatens their bond. Two fairy tales cast a sinister spin on conventional tropes: In ``The Princess and the Pea,'' the annoying object is palpable but unidentified; and in ``The Enchantment,'' medieval battle serves allegorically to represent contemporary relationships. A flawless story, ``Bread,'' explores the homoerotic passion of boarding-school girls, nicely catching muted expressions of desire and offering a deft testament to the supremacy of grace and poise. In ``A Relationship,'' Brown adroitly uses varying viewpoints to capture the dishonesty and unresolved business between a couple and the woman's former lover. Distinctly outside the mainstream of American short fiction, Brown has more in common with Angela Carter than, say, Ann Beattie. Her tales match a highly original imagination with style and intelligence. (Author tour)

Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1996

ISBN: 0-06-017440-4

Page Count: 144

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996

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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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