A weighty issue, but a wisp of a novel.
A guy sees a ghost. This leads to an evaluation of the supernatural in Lightman’s low-key fifth novel (Reunion, 2003, etc.).
When 42-year-old David Kurzweil loses his job at a bank, he goes to work at a mortuary. In the so-called slumber room, where relatives view their loved ones, David sees “a thing near a dead body. A vapor…It seemed alive. It had…intelligence. It looked at me.” Within seconds it’s gone. David is a regular guy, and we never doubt his honesty, though his account is generally greeted with skepticism. His boss Martin, the mortuary director, gently suggests he see a shrink. His story gets into the local paper, and David is visited by two emissaries from the Society for the Second World. They don’t seem like kooks, so David agrees to be the subject of an experiment which will test his openness to the nonmaterial world. The investigator, Dr. Tettlebeim, is pleased with the results, but David’s old friend Ronald, a university chemistry professor, thinks Tettlebeim’s claims of David’s special powers are absurd and should be denounced. David feels caught in the middle; he could do without the attention. After all, he does have a life of his own, though not much of one. It’s been eight years since his wife Bethany divorced him, but David’s lonely bachelor life has looked up since he started dating Ellen, a librarian, and his mortuary job, ghost aside, has proved surprisingly fulfilling. He enjoys working for the tender-hearted Martin, who has become a father figure (his own father died when he was eight). This should be fertile ground for teacher/physicist Lightman, best-known for the lightly worn erudition of Einstein’s Dreams (1993), and indeed he is scrupulously fair in presenting the arguments of the opposing camps. But the story never quite catches fire, and it ends with a transparently contrived death.
A weighty issue, but a wisp of a novel.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42169-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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