A wacky novel filled with scarcely believable yet entertaining twists of fate from the author of, most recently, But I Love You Anyway (1996). When she’s fired from a dead-end bank job, Jenny Brown prowls her bland suburb, searching for a fulfillment equivalent to that her preoccupied biologist husband Todd finds in studying the genetic properties of brain tumors. Her aimlessness works to her advantage when she wanders into the Institute of Affirmation, where a bevy of oddball classes are offered, including Homecooking for Your Pet, Living Alone and Loving It, and Finishing What You Started. Jenny sits in on an acting class and quickly gets hooked. The Institute’s motto, —The Answer is Yes,— becomes the new student’s mantra as she makes a series of bold and somewhat improbable moves. Frustrated by Todd’s seeming indifference, she choreographs a dramatic exit with her wise adoptive mother—only to discover that Todd never noticed she was gone. Then she agrees to direct a play for her acting class and finds herself welcomed into a community of quasi-misfits who provide the warmth that her marriage lacks. Given Jenny’s inexperience, the success of the first play seems just a little too lucky. Casting, costuming, and choreographing roles for more than 30 actors does intimidate her, but her new friends—conveniently, seamstresses and handymen—pitch in to help whenever she’s feeling overextended. Preparations, though, come to a grinding halt when the director falls off a ladder and ends up in the hospital, but the accident becomes the set-up for Todd, who rarely takes an interest in his wife, to overhear Michael (director of the Institute) professing love for her. Closing with a series of tidy surprises that test credibility, this is, still, a quirkily gratifying escape for any reader who believes in small miracles.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100326-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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