One of Just’s best works: stuffed with surprises, sparkling with insights.
Fourteenth outing for Just (The Weather in Berlin, 2002, etc.), who, supple as ever, takes coming-of-age material and puts his distinctive stamp on it.
Wils Ravan may live in farm country outside Chicago, but he’s no rube; he’s been sneaking into a Chicago jazz club since he was 15. Now 19 and wise beyond his years, his urbane narrative voice never seems discordant, a neat trick. His father, Teddy, a rock-ribbed Republican, owns a printing business, where he’s a paternalistic employer, shocked when his people strike. Thinking the Reds may be stirring the pot—it’s the early 1950’s—Teddy hires strikebreakers and carries a gun. When a brick crashes through the window during family dinner, Wils realizes what it means to protect your loved ones and bonds with his father as never before. Then the strike peters out (no winners) and Wils lands a summer job with a Chicago tabloid while going to debutante parties at night. To the North Shore crowd, Wils is newspaper riff-raff; to the reporters, he’s one of the exploiting classes. Caught between the two, he learns that perception can be everything. Then he meets Aurora, so different from the other airheads, no doubt because she’s the daughter of Jack Brune, a divorced Freudian therapist. The rapport is immediate, but the two fight over secrets: He doesn’t believe in having any, she does. Secrets, and their inevitability in even the closest relationships, are what the novel is about, and coming of age means only a partial de-coding of the mysteries. Wils will lose his virginity with Aurora, but their happiness is short-lived; the unpredictable Jack, a man of many secrets, shoots himself after a quarrel with his mistress Consuela, an exotic Greek Cypriot. Aurora orders Consuela out of the house; Wils fails to take his girl’s side, and the lovers become strangers. Wils emerges from his baptism of fire with enough mysteries to ponder for a lifetime.
One of Just’s best works: stuffed with surprises, sparkling with insights.Pub Date: July 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-03669-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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