All this falls far short of porn. Log on and join the fun.
Swift, immensely amusing first novel, a Brief Encounter set in Internet chat rooms, that starts marvelously, has a slight dip, then holds you to the bitter end.
Allan’s imaginings sound right on the nose for sexual frankness and Interchat vulgarity in 1999. His chat room is Literoticus.com and the members are, among others, Lisa33 (a mom in Georgia), Tagaabbcc, Moonbeam, Liquidjoy, Steve, Sandydee, Satish11, Humbert, LolaB, and MySweetPussyWantsU. This is largely a mutual masturbation society whose “masked” members keep getting out of hand and into intense, possibly life-changing real feelings about each other—not that their hand-sex doesn’t rise to real feelings. Newcomer Tag meets Lisa33 and is fairly surprised when she jumps into libidinous chat that, as any member builds toward orgasm, is forever cut into by maddening cross-talk from those with their own agendas. LolaB wants to know whether Matthew Arnold was an elitist and which three developments of the ’60s revolution are still with us—she has papers to write. The very restrained Satish11, an Indian medical student and still a virgin, has no idea how to stroke a girl on the Net. For heavier, more private feelings, Lisa33 and Tag, whose spouses have no idea that Literoticus.com even exists, go off to Instant Messaging or write long midnight e-mails. As their romance deepens, both reveal devotion to their kids and unhappy marriages. These fantasy lovers take on a heartfelt reality for each other, and they want to meet. But the first rule of chat rooms is never to reveal your identity, and Tag is a corporate lawyer. Moonbeam does dare to meet Steve, but is ruefully disappointed by him in sex and every other way. Should Tag and Lisa33 disturb their marriages, or maintain their “shallow, passion-free, tragedy-free, invalid existences”?
All this falls far short of porn. Log on and join the fun.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03165-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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