A second novel from Racina (The Great L.A. Blizzard, 1977) offers a busily plotted tale of obsessive love run nastily amok. We first meet gorgeous Matt Hinson in a snowstorm, gearing up to murder a beloved elderly couple as a ploy to win the love of their daughter Julia, inconveniently married to someone else. He accomplishes the deed with relish, disappearing on snowshoes only minutes before Julia arrives to discover the carnage. At the funeral, Matt delivers a sugary eulogy—and turns his calculating green eyes on the object of his desire. Luckily for him, Julia's marriage is in trouble: A recent mastectomy has ruined the couple's sex life, and husband Tom has withdrawn into his work. While Julia and seven-year-old daughter Molly hang around her dead parents' home and cavort in the snow with Matt (Tom's gone back to his San Francisco office), investigators are racking up evidence. Julia and Matt spend a passionate night together; the next day, he's charged with the double murder. Throughout the trial, Julia is his most ardent defender. She gets a volume of his sensitive poetry published, lobbies tirelessly for his release, and separates from her husband. Tom has three weeks of therapy, recognizes his faults and overcomes them, and tries to get his wife back. He reads some computer disks he's swiped from her desk, and learns that Matt unwittingly revealed to Julia his involvement in the murders. Matt, just released from prison, goes to Julia's penthouse to celebrate; she attempts revenge by shoving him off a balcony. But he survives to take her hostage, and heads for Yosemite to kill her, though fortunately the new, improved Tom is in pursuit. Meantime, shallow and unpleasant main characters and clumsy technical effects (Matt's whole trial, for instance, is reported via newspaper clips and TV transcripts) bog things down; the graphic sex is more unpleasant than titillating. Lurid, unbelievable, and thoroughly tedious.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94030-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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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