The American family—that one subject matter that's proven an undepletable mine for writers—gets another thorough going-over in Miller's second novel. And what rich veins she uncovers in a book that should further establish her reputation, even among those who felt skeptical about The Good Mother. Here, Miller widens her canvas to explore the complicated sources of trauma in a large family—Lainey and David Eberhardt, married shortly after WW II, and their half-dozen children who break down into two groups. First come Liddie, Mack, and Randall—the latter born severely retarded, the piece of grit in the familial oyster, around whom layers of emotional secretions form. In him, Lainey finds a perfect receptacle for love and histrionics. David, the cool psychiatrist who blames Lainey for Randall's retardation and can't allow his son to become the modus operandi of their lives, suffers stoically through his wife's three subsequent pregnancies (her way of making up for Randall), which produce Nina, Mary, and Sarah. These children, "the last straws," as David sometimes calls them, will bear the brunt of their parents' eventual separation and divorce. For a while, Mack stands in for his absent father, even while he undergoes a difficult adolescence during the Vietnam era. And years later, after Randall has been institutionalized, it falls to Nina to come to terms with the Eberhardt muddle—to embrace "the great loving carelessness at the heart of every family's life." Miller tells this tale from several viewpoints that produce memorable segments documenting Lainey's half. crazed, deeply sensual maternalism, Nina's struggle to see herself as an individual, Mack's identification with Randall (whom he once calls his twin), and David's hunger for a quieter life. Oddly, Randall remains the undramatic cipher, functioning largely as a symbol. Still, around him, the Eberhardts mesmerize, thanks to Miller's fresh eye and ceaseless probings.
Pub Date: May 1, 1990
ISBN: 0060929987
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
