Burdened with a clunky title, and far too close in tone to early Salinger, Brown's appealing debut nevertheless captures the traumatic process of growing up gay in an oppressively straight world. Human society has yet to devise a straighter institution than the American high school, which is where a glib but confused Ben Smith finds himself at the story's outset—as a freshman toting a hot-pink notebook in which he summarizes his daily trials, triumphs, and observations. Ben's homosexuality is not an issue that Brown leaves open for debate: The kid's as gay and proud as any closeted 14-year-old can be. But Ben has larger immediate problems than his emerging sexuality: From his besotted father to his weeping mother to his ultra-religious grandmother, not to mention a dim-wit brother, Ben's family life looks like a white- trash version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not to mention that the miserable clan lives behind a gas station. After a brief spell of mooning over his history teacher, Ben falls in with Aaron Silver, the bright new thing in Chappaqua, Maine. A child of liberal Jewish parents, Aaron sports an earring and almost immediately exhausts his welcome with school administrators when he begins publishing, aided by Ben, an incendiary underground newspaper. Endlessly annoying to the powers-that-be in their corseted environment, Ben and Aaron fall swiftly in love and start fooling around, an activity that Brown depicts with a refreshing if at times YA restraint. The issue here is that neither boy outs the other—they were both comfortably gay before they met. They do manage, however, to introduce themselves to the possibility of love and devotion (and adolescent obsessions)—a series of life lessons that troubles plenty of waters and, predictably, wrecks innocence forever. Not as good as Edmund White, but still an insightful first effort distinguished by punchy language and a solid emotional core.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-89084-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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