by Susan Coll ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2001
Despite some forced humor and strained parallels: a stylish debut.
An amusing debut novel that tries to put—and mostly succeeds in putting—an unusual spin on the clash between love and career, as the writer of a dissertation on Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor finds some eerie echoes in her own work and love life.
Narrator Ella Kennedy, who traces her interest in political theory to a crush on a former professor, has had trouble finding a subject for her doctoral thesis. And she needs a job because her father, who owns a chain of profitable discount stores, thinks Ella should now be self-supporting. So when her longtime friend Lisa, whose husband and child provide the tug of domesticity, suggests Ella move back to Washington, her hometown, and take over Lisa's job, she agrees. Her new boss is the Colonel, a former chief librarian at the Library of Congress whose ideas got him into trouble there, and who now heads a think tank, the Institute of Thought. (Both the Institute and the Colonel cleverly parody Washington institutions and types.) The Colonel, an elusive, hard-drinking man, needs a Marxist, for he's been give a grant by the Neoclassicists for Universal Thought (NUTS, of course) who want people to rethink Marx. As Ella struggles to develop a Web site for Marx and dig up Marx-related artifacts to sell, she begins a dissertation on Eleanor Marx, who fell in love and lived with a married man—a situation that neatly parallels her own, as she promptly falls in love with married, mysterious British ornithologist Nigel. The story is driven by the obligatory farcical mistakes and unlikely liaisons: the Neoclassicists turn out to be Russian Mafia seeking to launder money, and Nigel writes a play about birds that premieres in one of stores owned by Ella's father. The course of true love is no less fraught either.
Despite some forced humor and strained parallels: a stylish debut.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0003-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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