Pleasant enough in a punny way, but awfully British. Lots of sex to compensate for the lame jokes.
Can a divorced stand-up comedienne find happiness with a washing-machine repairman?
Sure, says the author of Neurotica (1999)—particularly when her dentist fiancé is away in South Africa. Rachel Katz isn’t positive she wants to marry Adam anyway, even if her mum is busily planning the wedding. Oh, well. Adam makes a good living even if he is deadly dull and prone to nosebleeds; and, despite her dreams of glory, Rachel isn’t exactly setting audiences on fire at the Anarchist Bathmat comedy club. Shelley, her best friend and neighbor, a health-food nut with gigantic bosoms, lends a sympathetic ear. Freewheeling Shelley isn’t sure Rachel should marry Adam, either. Rachel’s ten-year-old son Sam is indifferent, but he doesn’t really think about anything except his growing collection of Barbra Streisand records. Is it possible he’s gay like his father? Rachel frets over this until Matt Clapton, a hunky washing-machine repairman, becomes a distraction. He thinks she’s hysterically funny, and he’s happy to be her (cough, cough) handyman. Rachel feels a few pangs of guilt for cheating, but she reasons that it doesn’t matter since she and Adam hardly ever had sex. She’s got other things to worry about: her mum is having a bikini wax and shopping for revealing underwear. What on earth? Then she catches her parents doing something wild with another elderly couple! The truth comes out: Mum and Dad are baring their wrinkly bottoms for a how-to sex video for seniors. Oh, well. No big deal compared to the latest news flash from South Africa: Adam’s dumping her for an anorexic dental hygienist who starches her underwear. Rachel can’t worry about that now: she’s getting ready for a big comedy competition, which she just might win if an Aussie upstart doesn’t steal all her material. Life goes on, and so do the silly contrivances.
Pleasant enough in a punny way, but awfully British. Lots of sex to compensate for the lame jokes.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-440-50923-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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