Installment number two in a proposed annual series of paired collections featuring gay and lesbian writers (see Hers, p. 811). The 18 pieces compiled here run an unpredictable gamut, from quietly desperate gay coming-of-age tales (``Tar Pit Heart,'' by Tim Miller) to oddly subversive science-fiction yarns ( Frank DiPalmero's ``The Option of the Coat''). According to the editors, the primary criterion for inclusion was literary quality, and while that's a hopelessly ambiguous way of evaluating the offerings, the best stories are indeed very good. Mark Shaw's ``Queerbait,'' for instance, finds a couple of midwestern gays lose in a punk-rock, tough-talking demimonde that's part Christopher Isherwood, part Dennis Cooper. In Bernard Cooper's ``Arson,'' a morally troubled young teenager decides to expunge his guilt by torching his porn in his parents' garage, only to have the burnt fragments of his illicit desire drift into hidden corners. ``To Nam and Bac,'' by Henri Tran, conflates queer issues with colonial anxieties by locating its narrative in preFall of Saigon Vietnam. ``The Road to Mary's Place,'' from David Kelly, finds a cosmopolitan gay man on a visit to his hometown; he's forced to save a hustler he has recently tricked with from the kid's redneck homophobe brothers. But Jason Friedman's ``The Wedding Dress'' is the anthology's standout: a carefully delivered contemporary southern story, reminiscent of Madison Smartt Bell, in which a teenager finds a wedding dress, briefly becomes a local celebrity, and gets spirited off by the dress's male owner, who gives him his first awkward taste of sex. Not all of the pieces strive to explore explicitly queer themes, and some of the less successful ones struggle to get going: Rick Sandford's ``Levi,'' for all its good intentions, reads like creepy pedantry, and Patrick Gale's ``Wig'' suffers from a damagingly self-conscious diction. Not uniformly brilliant, but in places luminous.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-571-19866-X
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
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
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