A 15-year-old small-town lad in WW II Ireland expands his social horizons, and develops a romantic obsession—in this fine, characteristic Trevor story, one of the slightest (if purest) entries in the Harper Short Novel Series thus far. Harry, now 58, unmarried, and childless, recalls his adolescence during the war—when he was finishing up at a rectory grammar school, slated to start work soon at his father's timberyard. (His sister Annie—despite dreams of working as a Dublin shopgirl—has already been consigned forever to the timberyard office.) But Harry's life is changed forever when beautiful newcomer Mrs. Messinger, the young, thin English wife of a middle-aged German refugee, asks the youth to help her with some packages. Smitten, Harry is soon paying frequent visits to the Messingers' comfortable, European-style country house—where Frau Messinger reminisces about her English childhood and speaks of her unlikely marriage to 62-year-old Herr Messinger (a widower Whose sons are Nazi soldiers) with glowing affection. Despite coarse pressures from his bigoted parents, his sex. obsessed schoolmates, and other provincial sorts, Harry remains steadfast in his idealized devotion to the couple. So, when wealthy Herr M. decides to build a lavish, elegant cinema for the town (the romantic Alexandra), Harry's heart-and-soul are wrapped up in the project—especially once he realizes that the building of the moviehouse is Herr M.'s gift to a dying wife in her last months. And in time Harry will inherit the ultimately doomed Alexandra—escaping the world of the timberyard, but spending his life (not entirely plausibly) in the shadow of the Messingers' special love: "Fate has made me the ghost of an interlude; once in a while I say that in the town, trying to explain." More longish story than novella, without the strong political/historical resonance of some bolder Trevor tales—but exquisitely detailed, perfectly modulated in its bittersweet tone, and quietly, leanly, expertly told.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1987
ISBN: 0375504710
Page Count: 99
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1987
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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