The novel’s predictability will likely delight Steel’s die-hard fans, but it won’t win any new ones.
A highly successful woman ponders romance with a younger man.
Steel (Until the End of Time, 2013, etc.) returns with her latest romance. Blaise McCarthy is our heroine. With huge green eyes, red hair, fine features and a fantastic figure, Blaise could easily pass for a woman in her 30s, even though she is practically pushing 50. With stark exposition, Steel outlines a life littered with romantic troubles. Her first husband, a cameraman, died while covering news from an unspecified war zone; her second husband, a venture capitalist 22 years her senior, gave her a beloved daughter, but they soon drifted apart from each other; her next serious relationship crashed and burned when she discovered that charming Andrew Weyland had no intention of ever divorcing his wife. Luckily, her daughter, Salima, thoughtfully understands that Blaise’s job as a renowned television journalist must take precedence over time together. Blinded by juvenile diabetes, Salima still lives with a personal caregiver on the grounds of the Caldwell School in Massachusetts. It’s a perfect life, if you disregard the loneliness of coming home to an empty apartment and limiting love to dinner dates with billionaire Saudi oil executives. It’s a perfect life until Salima’s caregiver dies, the Caldwell school is shut down under quarantine, and Salima is sent home with Simon, her gorgeous, new, very male caregiver. And then there’s the arrival of Susie Quentin, the beautiful, younger new anchor jockeying for Blaise’s job. Forced to take Salima and Simon into her home, Blaise must not only endure disruptions to her routine, but also face the fact that she is strongly attracted to Simon. But could he possibly want an older woman who may not be able to give him the family he wants?
The novel’s predictability will likely delight Steel’s die-hard fans, but it won’t win any new ones.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53094-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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