Well conceived, and great stylistically—but too long and shapeless to work, whether as satire, thriller, or horror story.
Second-novelist Moloney (A Dry Spell, 1997) offers a rather-too-leisurely account of a haunted house and its successive families.
Having recently become a widow, Glenn Darnley returns to work as a realtor and takes on 362 Belisle, a new listing that’s suddenly come on the market. Newly renovated, the house is a roomy old Victorian in a great part of town—perfect for young families. There’s only one problem: It’s haunted. Glenn doesn’t dwell on that point, however, and she soon manages to sell it to Dan and Rebecca Mason, a young couple settling into their careers and looking for a place to nest. They dismiss—as mice—the weird noises coming from the attic, but the old woman they see wandering the stairs gives them something of a fright. Rebecca is stubborn, though, and refuses to move—until Dan is murdered by an unknown hand. She lets Glenn sell the place (at a decent profit) to Barbara Perkins, an unhappy divorcée with an eight-year-old son. Barbara and the boy soon begin to enjoy visits from a strange young girl who appears out of nowhere—and vanishes just as quickly. The two like her company so much that they both vanish, too. Glenn takes the listing once more and sells it to a drunken writer named Richie Bramley. Richie is a kind of superannuated frat boy, not the sort to give in too easily to simple worry, much less to panic and dread. He, too, though, begins to feel a tad uncomfortable when nooses appear, hanging from the ceiling beams. Instead of putting the house on the market again, however, Glenn decides to move into it herself. She’s spent so much time in the place, after all, that it feels like her own home—and, besides, she senses that the house is “full of life.”
Well conceived, and great stylistically—but too long and shapeless to work, whether as satire, thriller, or horror story.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-5662-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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