A quite celebration of the examined life lived with rueful acceptance.
A slice-of-life quietly chronicles the ways domestic lives are roiled by unexpected changes and losses that challenge a retired couple’s good intentions.
Like all finely wrought novels celebrating domesticity, appearances are deceptive as seemingly placid and conventional characters confront inner turmoil and even the most ordered suburbs are subject to violence. The protagonist in this latest from Booker winner (1974) Middleton (Changes and Chances, 1992, etc.) is John Stone, 67 and the retired headmaster of a distinguished state school. John and his wife, Peg, live in Beechnall, a provincial town in the English Midlands, where both are still involved in the community. They have a large semidetached Victorian villa with a garden that John tends daily, and their neighbors are Annie and Harry Fisher, whose house is a mirror image of theirs. As the story begins, Peg is away in Scotland with older sister May, and when Annie Fisher comes over for tea, she tells John she has a lump in her breast and must undergo some tests. While she talks, John remembers how she seduced him when he first came to Beechnall, and how over the years they had intermittently continued their relationship. As John’s memories mix with the present, he and Peg try to help May, a widow who’s being courted by an obsessive widower; counsel both May’s son John James and his partner, Linda, a successful banker like John James, who wants him to give up his job and live in the country; and comfort Annie when Harry suddenly dies. Never sure that their efforts matter, they still feel obliged to help, though their world is changing: a car is abandoned and set on fire on their nice street; before he dies, Harry is questioned by the police because a woman he had a relationship with has been murdered; and May’s suitor, discouraged, has an emotional collapse in her home.
A quite celebration of the examined life lived with rueful acceptance.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-09-179949-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hutchinson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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 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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