Riotously funny from the start, the sharp edge of the author’s satire turns this tale into something very different from...
A deft, funny, and ultimately quite moving debut about the strenuous and determined efforts of a young Irish aristocrat to evade all contact with the real world.
Beneath a thick veneer of upper-class insouciance, Charles Hythloday is beset with problems on every side. He’s a world-class drunk, a university dropout, an involuntary celibate, a spendthrift, a dreamer, and a great big baby. He’s also on the verge of bankruptcy, a fact that he prefers to ignore but is being forced, slowly and reluctantly, to confront. The son of a cosmetics mogul who died a few years back and left his family a mountain of debt administered by a shady offshore bank, Charles (now 24) has never had a job and spends his days and nights roaming the house and grounds of his ancestral estate outside Dublin, methodically drinking the cellar dry and watching old Gene Tierney movies on TCM. His sister Bel has recently finished acting school and intrudes upon Charles’s arcadia by bringing home a succession of boorish young men whose unfathomable accents and indescribable attire provide vivid proof of the depth of her nostalgie de la boue. Her latest beau, a junk dealer named Frank, arrives on the scene just as a succession of household objects begins to disappear on an almost daily basis. His suspicions aroused, Charles hires a private detective (actually, he’s just a drunken postman) to set a trap for Frank—but the truth turns out to be stranger and more horrible than Charles had imagined. Eventually, Charles is forced to leave his little Brideshead and make his way in the world—which turns out to be just as appalling as he feared. For Bel, the consequences of her family’s decline are different but even more tragic. Modern Ireland, in Murray’s telling, would seem to have little room for grace or beauty—but, then again, Yeats was making the same complaint in 1916.
Riotously funny from the start, the sharp edge of the author’s satire turns this tale into something very different from comedy by the end and reveals Murray as a master of narrative sleight of hand.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6116-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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