In this historical romance, an intriguing idea is diminished by clichÇd writing and a main character who is at first witless and insensitive and then almost lifeless. Hylton (Summer of the Flamingoes, 1991, etc.) starts out auspiciously with the story of Laura Levinson-Gore. In the 1920s, fresh out of finishing school, this daughter of a social-climbing American mother and a British father sails from England to Egypt with her mother and younger sister. On board she meets Egyptian prince Ahmed Hassan Farag, an Oxford graduate returning home. The two share a few kisses, but Ahmed has been promised to marry someone else and insists that their cultures will not accept each other. Although she has been rushed into an engagement with a man from a noble family, Laura visits Ahmed dressed in an Egyptian costume for a masquerade ball and pouts, ``I can look just as Egyptian as you can.'' He still resists, but while in Egypt she tracks Ahmed down and runs off with him. En route to see his parents and ask for their blessing, a bomb kills Ahmed but leaves the pregnant Laura alive. When her mother insists that she give the illegitimate child up for adoption, Laura accepts an offer from Ahmed's parents to live in a secluded palace. Later, isolated in the desert and then married to a cruel Syrian cousin of Ahmed's, she retreats into herself. Laura then chooses to send her daughter Rosetta to board at a London school where, naturally, she encounters the upper-crust offspring of her mother's long-lost friends and relatives. Hylton's descriptions of both people and places have a numbing vagueness to them: Ahmed is ``a splendid example of young Egyptian manhood.'' What aspires to be an examination of cultural difference instead disintegrates into a routine romance with a poorly painted, if exotic, setting.
Pub Date: July 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11004-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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