Earnest and engaging: a nicely turned-out if unsurprising debut that’s not likely to stay in a reader’s mind for long.
A twentysomething man comes of age somewhat belatedly, in part by discovering an old man’s secret past.
Nathan Carter is a true Boston Brahmin, but there wasn’t much silver left on the baby’s spoon by the time he was born, and his childhood was far from privileged. Now a thirtysomething slacker, Nathan spent most of his 20s hanging out in Boston, where he waited tables and moved passionlessly from one short-term girlfriend to another. When his father died and left him a small inheritance, Nathan took the money and left town, heading up to northern Vermont and settling in the small town of Eden. There, he took a job as a mailman and started going out with Kate, the daughter of the local tavernkeeper. It was beginning to look like a rural rerun of Boston—until Nathan met Wallace Fiske, the town recluse. An old Vermonter, Wallace grew up in Eden and worked his family’s farm on the outskirts of town. Ornery and brusque (even by New England standards), Wallace is not easy to make friends with, but he eventually opens up to Nathan and slowly, piece by piece, reveals to him the story of his life. The focus of it is Nora, Wallace’s late wife, whom Wallace fell in love with on first sight in the late 1940s. Wallace is short on details but he describes the miscarriage that broke Nora’s heart and took her will to live. What Nathan finds out on his own, however, is that Nora is, in fact, alive and well in upstate New York, long estranged from Wallace. What went wrong? Nathan and Kate are impulsive types, so they visit Nora to find out. It’s a predictably sad story, involving death, adultery, betrayal, and despair. Typical backwoods Vermont, in other words.
Earnest and engaging: a nicely turned-out if unsurprising debut that’s not likely to stay in a reader’s mind for long.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4427-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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