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MR. DALLOWAY

paper 1-889330-29-9 Another in the imitation-of-the-greats genre, this time turning on the narrow premise that Mr. Clarissa Dalloway was gay. (Lippincott wrote The Real, True Angel, stories, not reviewed.) For a decade, Richard Dalloway, aged 55 and retired from Parliament, has been carrying on an affair with one Robert Davies, ten years his junior and as enamored of Richard as Richard is of him. Clarissa herself, when Richard confessed to her the nature of what was going on, informed him with classic tolerance that she “understood——and that seemed to have been that. And yet Richard’s secret torture still won—t go away as he suffers ploddingly between the torment of desire and the awful terror of discovery. Like Mrs. Dalloway in her book, Mr. Dalloway walks through the park, buys flowers, thinks about the past, plans a party—for the Dalloways” 30th anniversary. His and others” thoughts are portrayed amid small blizzards of parentheses (and shouldn—t they be?) far in excess (one can—t help but feel) of any Woolfian measure, while a craven imitativeness in style, however skilled, seems designed as much to fill stage-time as to advance or reveal (Woolf’s towering purpose) things (—Oh, it is cruel, Richard Dalloway thought—life, time: cruel—). Waiting (and waiting) for the party to begin, explorations are made into the causes of the same-sex love in Robbie and Richard—Robbie’s wonderful relation with his now-absent father, Richard’s hideous relation with his—not to mention Richard’s unbounded love for his younger brother Duncan, who in his early teens, however, bowed tragically out of life altogether (—There. There it was. There he was—a white, bloodless Duncan, hanging...from one of the rafters. No! Richard turned away. It couldn—t be! No! It wasn—t possible . . . .—). A first novel that’s often elegant (to a fault, one quickly adds) in imitation of surface and style but that gravely misconstrues its high model by bending it to lesser and unoriginal aims.

Pub Date: July 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-889330-28-0

Page Count: 232

Publisher: Sarabande

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999

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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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