Entertainment Lite: wisecracking and contrived.
Whitfield (Something’s Wrong With Your Scale!, 1999, etc.) returns to that trendy urban landscape where would-be cool black guys hang out trying to make the right moves on their women.
Whitfield knows his guys and their tastes, their habits and their fears—and, here, the story, told by bus driver Simon Washington, or, as he calls himself, “mass transit operator,” and by financial consultant Stuart Worthington, focuses on all of them. Simon, Stuart, Rod, and Trevor all grew up in the same Maryland suburb, work in nearby D.C., and have been friends since childhood. They're snappy dressers, like expensive cars, and enjoy kidding one another. But Trevor and Rod are married, while Simon and Stuart are not. They’re not ready for it, but they do need dates for the group’s annual vacation somewhere fun and warm. Alternately, Simon and Stuart each describe the women they’ve met recently—attractive but hard to pin down. Both of them—Simon’s Eve and Stuart’s Lynn—are always in hurry to go somewhere else, and both are mysteriously vague about the past. Failing to find dates for the upcoming vacation, and tired of being teased by Rod and Trevor for being so hopeless at relationships, both decide that perhaps Lynn and Eve should be the ones to accompany them to Cancun, the year’s chosen destination. Stuart cooks a dinner for Simon and Eve, then another for himself and Lynn, planning at each meal to extend their invitations. Clumsy foreshadowing, unfortunately, undercuts the intended surprise element of their, as usual, futile machinations. But these are good guys who deserve something better. True friends, they console Rod when he’s diagnosed with prostate cancer, and they mentor two reluctant but smart juvenile offenders. And, of course, good things eventually do happen to Simon and Stuart, who also learn much about women and life in the process.
Entertainment Lite: wisecracking and contrived.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49846-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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