Fourteen stories from Hall (Family Fictions, 1991, etc.)—a literate, and literary, grab-bag, mostly gay explorations of post- AIDS grief, social conundrums, and loyalty, though there are a couple of odd, antic pieces as well. The best include ``Avery Milbanke Day,'' in which a 70-year- old writer, his seven novels about ``the literature of hesitation'' long neglected, decides to stay with his old dying lover and nurse him through a final crisis instead of attending a public celebration of the novels and the writer. Likewise, ``The Jilting of Tim Weatherall'' manages to have it both ways: it cops a thing or two from the Katherine Anne Porter story ``The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'' but still movingly dramatizes the death of a young man with AIDS who has been abandoned by his natural family. ``The Cannibals,'' a haunting story, allows a Puerto Rican sick with AIDS to have a final vision of himself leaving New York (``...a trick, a deception, a story mirage''), then returning home to find mystical communion with the Carib Indians. The rest are all competently conceived and executed, but they lack the power of those three, tending toward either slice-of-life (``A Faustian Bargain,'' about the travails of a pianist with gay inclinations who married as a result of a clause in a will; ``A Simple Relationship,'' about a once-married man who cannot reach orgasm with his new male lover until that lover tenderly perseveres over a period of months; and ``Manhattan Transfer,'' about the grieving process of a 50-year-old AIDS widower) or odd, jaunty comedy (``Diamonds Are Forever,'' wherein a brother and sister fight over the family jewels; and ``Death Writes a Story,'' an exuberant takeoff on hard-boiled prose). A mixed collection, but Hall—when he's in top form—writes about gay men over 40 in a measured, often moving voice that explores the difficulties of grief and commitment.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-83785-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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