Forced events and a lackluster cast undermine an otherwise entertaining first novel.
Sins of the father visit the son in paranoia, hubris, violence and corruption.
Walter Brimm, a deceitful investment executive, is convinced that his wife Gee, a sociology prof, is having an affair with ur-liberal Tod Marcum, publisher of Kerrytown Review, owner of a bohemian café, and wearer of leather moccasins. Gee, Walter feels, has been neglecting her duties of sex and childcare. Since she’s constantly working overtime with Tod on the latest social injustice, Walter daydreams about sloppy trysts and wives “placing more than a Chekhovian kiss upon the quivering sex” of other people’s husbands. He stews over news stories about scandal in love and business (to him inseparable) and reminisces over his own father’s imprisonment for fraud. Nostalgia works as a temporary buffer against immorality, though before long, his paranoia corrupts his judgement and he begins stealing Tod’s surefire ideas for real estate bids and marketing flexible watchbands. Walter confides in former client Jack Gorne, a tawdry, one-dimensional Execu-playa. After several Faustian deals, Walter ends up with a misappropriation of funds charge while attempting to bankrupt Tod. After losing it all, crashing a benefit and ending up in a hospital, he’s befriended by painter Myrian and her handicapped lover, Janus. Events fall into order too neatly as, it turns out, Walter’s new friends are also friends with Tod. In their presence, Walter grows determined to make reparations for his past sins but soon learns Tod and Gee have shacked up. Enter the paranoid’s timeless dilemma: Do ends justify means? Sequences and characters move in and out of believability as we learn of Janus’s own fraudulent past, for which a claims adjuster blackmails him in order to photograph Myrian nude. We’re treated to strained parallels between the present novel and masterworks, while the sheer volume of exclamations feels bizarrely Russian and the ending is rushed to an offstage gunfight, an innocent plea, and twin confessions.
Forced events and a lackluster cast undermine an otherwise entertaining first novel.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9724295-0-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Brook Street Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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