Biographer of poet Frank O'Hara, novelist Gooch (Scary Kisses, 1988) here tells us everything we ever wanted to know about the dark and decadent gay subculture in Manhattan before AIDS altered the landscape: A well-written and intelligent novel that's of more than sociological or historical interest. At the center of this voyeuristically compelling narrative is a relationship similar to that between hustler aesthete Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith. In Gooch's fictional version, Sean Devlin, a small-town boy from Pennsylvania, drops out of Columbia to become a filmmaker. Admittedly ``self-involved, vague, and indifferent,'' Sean makes up quickly for his chaste adolescence by plunging into New York's gay scene of bathhouses, bars, and porn theaters. In the Village, he encounters the ``outlaw'' Annie Boyle while she's publicly preaching the virtues of masturbation, in her own unique version of performance art. Soon, like Mapplethorpe and Smith, they're rooming together at the Chelsea Hotel, masturbating together, and dreaming of God (i.e., Andy Warhol). Fueled with all sorts of drugs, Sean becomes ``a voyeur of his low life'' and enjoys a number of increasingly kinky scenarios at the baths, where he's tied up, spanked, etc. His first artsy feature, the quasi- pornographic Sean Has His Nipple Pierced, draws the attention and patronage of the sophisticated collector Edgar Savage, who introduces Sean to the haute homosexual world of the Upper East Side. In the legendary bars of the West Village and on the old piers, Sean indulges his taste for rough and rougher trade. As both Annie and Sean become semi-famous, he explores the darkest realms of gay sex, the netherworld of ``penetration and death.'' Sean the observer soon becomes the observed as he films himself being gang- raped, but goes too far when an anonymous master/slave scene threatens his life. Chastened, he discovers true love—too late. A solid, unblinking, unsentimental look at a vanished era.
Pub Date: June 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44708-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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