A probing and provocative examination of the experience of love as the mind and body approach old age, by the eminent British author best known for The Golden Notebook, her classic depiction of woman's fate (which this new novel intermittently evokes and resembles). Sarah Durham is 65, long widowed and freed of most family responsibilities. Yet she's burdened by the needs of her teenaged niece Joyce (whose parents virtually abandon her to Sarah's care), and also handles a demanding job as all-purpose manager (and sometime writer and director) with a thriving London theater. A play in production, Julie Vairon, requires Sarah to research the life and work of its title character, a beautiful quadroon girl from Martinique whom various men loved to distraction and who spent the last years of her brief life in France, where she became an accomplished composer and a famous diarist. The image of this mysterious woman's mingled happiness and despair reawakens in Sarah feelings long suppressed, as do the flirtations of a handsome young actor who joins the play's cast, as well as the more comfortable (though no less erotic) presence of its 35-year-old director, a man irrevocably committed to his family. We feel throughout this absorbing story—told both from Sarah's viewpoint and in its author's confident omniscient voice—the pressure of a preternaturally keen analytical intelligence, making every vividly dramatized scene resonate with judicious commentary. The web of sensation, emotion, and fantasy that all but overpowers Sarah during her reawakening is woven with clarity and force, and when Lessing frankly describes Sarah's sexual rekindling, you almost feel the heat rising off the pages. Lessing is a contemporary George Eliot, an intellectual whose imagination is firmly grounded in the sensual life and the natural world. Love, Again is a triumphant vindication of her literary method.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017687-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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