An engrossing, bittersweet comedy—the seventh novel from the author of Rebel Powers (1993), among others—about sexual confusion, Catholic guilt, and Washington in the wake of the JFK administration. Walter Marshall, an energetic 19-year-old, has, in 1964, just realized that he may be wasting his time at the D'Alessandro School of Broadcasting—for, instead of emulating his idol Edward R. Murrow, Walter now suspects that what he really desires is to follow in the footsteps of his other idol, the recently deceased chief executive. Problems rapidly develop. Walter manages to propose to two different older women—co-worker Alice Kane, whose ardent expectation of the physical satisfactions thereby promised conflicts with Walter's strenuously maintained purity, and Natalie Bowman, a vaguely European beauty whose ``tall, lithe figure and. . . dark, aristocratic features reminded him of Jackie Kennedy.'' Walter's inability to say no to any opportunity or entanglement forces him into best-friendship with the awkward, unshakably optimistic Albert Waple, a wonderfully hapless plot to save the D'Alessandro School from its owner's gambling debts, conflict with the equally turbulent romantic life of Walter's widowed mother, and, best of all, a sit-in demonstration at a Maryland restaurant in company with a courageous elderly black woman who may be the most influential of his several mentors and role models. The novel ends with Walter (figuratively) bloodied but unbowed, shorn of his handsome head of hair and many of his illusions, but newly committed to still another ideal. He's a charmer, and the book's lightly worn seriousness of purpose is effectively and pleasingly varied by several very funny scenes—including Alice's heartfelt attempt to surrender to her beau, and Walter's intricately detailed confessions to his bewildered parish priest. It's nice to see Bausch extending his range in a novel that compares favorably with the best work he has done. ($30,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017332-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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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