None
One's sexual nature and expression, inextricably bound up with one's creative destiny, can, when denied, result in a death-in- life. This cautionary conviction is underscored by novelist and critic Grumbach (the memoir Fifty Days of Solitude, 1994, etc.) in a multi-edged tale about four withered young lives. In the summer of 1929, Caleb (12) and Kate (10) Flowers live with their widowed, deaf mother in a large veranda-ed house in seaside Far Rockaway, N.Y. Then visitors arrive—bossy, 13-year-old Roslyn Hellman and timid Lionel Schwartz, 19—and soon Roslyn is leading games, including one disastrous (and foreshadowing) attempt to test the Book of Knowledge account of the behavior of lemmings. It's also that summer when Caleb and Kate, intrigued by their mirror-image intimacy, experiment sexually. The narrative then turns to another summer when Roslyn, now a bristly young teenager hooked on movies and rebel politics, is at a Catskill all-girls' camp, sneering at her lumpen peers and collecting material for her writing career. (Grumbach's reading of some earnest team efforts to regiment recreation in the early days of summer camps is both funny and touching.) Roslyn has a first serious crush on a counselor (handily rejected); then a few years later Caleb is at college, determined to deny Kate any hint of their childhood sexual games, and theatrically alone—until he meets Lionel. Their love is devouring, absolute. But like Roslyn (whose dreams of accomplishment began to wane after a stint in the wartime WAVES and another dose of the double standard), and like rejected, sin-ridden Kate, Caleb will make a socially acceptable choice. Only Lionel, by his death in the army, escapes the others' long, dry shrivelling of the soul: ``It is true of all human beings that they are dualities...herein lies all the bloody warfare in the person, to be who we are and not what we have been made.'' Immaculate in prose and tone: one of Grumbach's best.
None NonePub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03770-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
IN THE NEWS
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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