For Jaffe fans, this epic tale may well satisfy; others are likely to find it more cloying than not.
Jaffe (Five Women, 1997, etc.) once again returns to her familiar (albeit formulaic) approach and offers a saga spanning five generations of American women.
The story begins and ends with the life of Rose Smith, born at the turn of the century. As it opens, ten-year-old Rose has just lost her mother and is left to the care of an older sister, a distant father, and an uncaring stepmother. Rose suffers through adolescence and young womanhood, then finally narrowly escapes spinsterhood by marrying, at age 25, a man she doesn't love. Quickly, Rose’s own family begins to grow and develop, and to her credit, Jaffe has nicely mirrored the significant changes in America that happen simultaneously: women’s liberation, world wars, technological and medical breakthroughs, and the sexual revolution are all witnessed through the eyes of Jaffe’s people. But though Jaffe liberally sprinkles historical tidbits throughout the text, most are glossed over too quickly to provide any significant weight to the narrative. The author’s true strength is the manner in which she acknowledges and brings to life the societal pressures that have been placed on women—pressures that have influenced their personal decisions on issues concerning marriage, divorce, and abortion over the last 100 years. When her characters do come to life, it is because of the sense of internal struggle that Jaffe is so adept at developing. Her frantic pace, however, keeps the action moving so quickly that most of them feel one-dimensional, and plotlines twist and turn a little too rapidly to afford them the opportunity to resonate.
For Jaffe fans, this epic tale may well satisfy; others are likely to find it more cloying than not.Pub Date: July 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-525-97774-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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