The story of a hopeful young woman’s disillusioning descent through the worlds of academe, politics, and film makes for a curious hybrid that falls awkwardly between the romantic comedy of Barnhardt’s ingratiating first novel (Emma Who Saved My Life, 1989) and the baroque overkill that flattened his second (Gospel, 1993) Samantha Flint (whose notebooks record her story) arrives at Smith College in 1978 from Missouri, a self-conscious thorn among the pampered, whiny roses whose company she seeks. Sam plans to write “the Great American Working Woman’s Novel,” but instead drifts into the orbit of flamboyant “Mimi” Mohr, a go-getter who—ll eventually prosper as a “manager” of movie stars’ careers. After college, Sam works for a moderate Republican Senator, then joins the staff of his calculating reactionary colleague (whom she double-crosses when the sleazy Senator Shanker uses his son’s suicide for political gain). Just ahead are flings with alcohol, psychoanalysis, marriage to a “gay boytoy” actor who’s done in by his fondness for “kinky sexplay,” and exploratory lesbian sex—all as part of a numbed quest for “something passionate that would obliterate the drudgery, the wearisome effort her life had become.” Barnhardt’s prose seldom rises to subtler or more specific levels, and his lumpy plot unwisely evokes memories of both Candy and Valley of the Dolls; Sam isn’t a sufficiently credible or interesting character. There are clever inventions (the lyrics to the hit single “Inside You” are a rude treat) and a few vivid scenes (Sam’s sad-funny reunion with her father, living in TV-drugged bliss with his middle-aged girlfriend at the Paradise Acres trailer park is a comic gem). But the novel takes aim at too many easy targets and never reconciles its campy melodrama with the coming-of-age story we—re prepared to expect. Barnhardt is better than this. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18684-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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