by Ursula Hegi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2007
Extremely readable, but thoroughly unpleasant.
Grim, gripping fiction from Hegi (Sacred Time, 2003, etc.) about childhood friends whose triangular relationship goes horribly wrong.
Annie drives around eastern Long Island at night, listening to psychologists’ call-in programs to distract herself from the horror of her husband Mason’s recent suicide. He hung himself in Annie’s studio, among her collages so she’d never be able to work there again, making sure that she would be the one to find him. And he did it after he’d goaded her and their best friend Jake into an act (unspecified at first, but it’s clear what happened) that prompted Annie to tell Mason their marriage was over. We quickly learn that Mason has threatened suicide before when he didn’t get his own way and that he’s pathologically jealous. The narrative intermingles past and present—including a pre-suicide monologue by Mason—to show the three children growing up in adjacent houses; the tensions that arose from Jake’s mother providing paid day care for Annie and Mason; fraught teenage years of shifting sexual alliances; the death of Annie’s parents in a car accident on her wedding day, leaving 19-year-old Annie and Mason to raise her newborn sister Opal as their daughter; Annie’s struggle to deal with Mason’s suicide, her guilt and Opal’s furious bereavement. Every development demonstrates that Mason was, from childhood, a sociopath: greedy, selfish, a liar and a manipulator. The problem—and it’s a big one—is that we never see the charm that must have accompanied his pathology, so it’s very hard to understand why the other two didn’t dump him years ago. Despite this major plausibility issue, the story compels by virtue of its sheer velocity and a host of well-drawn subsidiary characters. But a heavily foreshadowed final revelation isn’t the epiphany Hegi seems to intend, and any hope suggested by Annie and Jake’s reconciliation is decidedly dampened by the chilling portrait of Opal, who appears to have acquired by example Mason’s tendency to threaten and punish.
Extremely readable, but thoroughly unpleasant.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4375-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ursula Hegi
BOOK REVIEW
by Ursula Hegi
BOOK REVIEW
by Ursula Hegi
BOOK REVIEW
by Ursula Hegi
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
32
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.D. Salinger
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.