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DOLLEY

This pallid historical novel explores Dolley Madison's tenure as first lady, focusing in particular on the year 1814 and conflict with the British. Brown (Venus Envy, 1993, etc.) brings little of her characteristic humor to the tale, making Madison a virtuous bore. Third-person accounts of dinner parties and cabinet meetings are interspersed with selections from Madison's fictional diary, but it all seems geared more to relating historical facts than to entertaining. While a list of characters and short descriptions of their roles precedes the text, Brown finds it necessary to explicate further whenever anyone is introduced, and there are endless passages about Madison's insight into politics and her amazing social skills. Her love for her husband is true and steady, adding little spice to the story; even when certain newspapers accuse the first lady of sleeping around, her husband never doubts her. Madison's involvement in the lives of her slaves is interesting but handled too primly. Sukey, Madison's personal servant, is promiscuous and rebellious (claiming that she will never marry, she says, ``I'm not being the slave of a slave''), but the other people toiling under her command are faithful and adoring. One even insists that were he to be freed, he would remain with her. Some of Madison's recollections about her Quaker upbringing and her growing obsession with shooting craps are intriguing, but they are rarely integral to the proceedings. For those interested in the gossipy side of history there are tidbits like the rumor that John Randolph may have had shrunken genitals or that Louis Serurier, minister from France, and his wife, Lisel, had ``a European marriage at its best,'' meaning that they were free to have affairs. Ultimately, however, nothing much happens in Madison's life. A war rages, but there is little forward motion in her retelling of daily events. Unusually prudish work sabotaged by the author's admiration for her subject. (Literary Guild alternate selection)

Pub Date: May 20, 1994

ISBN: 0-553-08890-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994

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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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