The absence of a formal plot may frustrate many readers. But for those who hear the music of its elegant rhetoric, the...
The enigmatic confluence of memory and imagination is explored with teasing subtlety in this 11th novel from Banville, the Irish author of such intensely stylized fiction as The Book of Evidence (1990) and The Untouchable (1997).
The narrator and central (indeed, only fully developed) character is Alex Cleave, a middle-aged stage actor who walks away from his current play to return to the house he grew up in, vacant since his widowed mother’s recent death. As if enacting his surname’s contrary meanings, Cleave embraces the past (which visits him in the form of various “ghosts”) while simultaneously sundering relationships with the wife (Leah, whom he has renamed “Lydia”) he has left and the emotionally disturbed daughter (Cass) from whom he had grown increasingly estranged. Banville portrays Cleave as a wary egoist (“I am all inwardness,” he muses) who prefers “appearing” as a player in imaginary people’s lives to interacting with real ones. An unoriginal concept, but the story isn’t clichéd, because this insecure solipsist’s uncertain relation to reality is expressed in finely honed sentences graced by arresting metaphors (a new mother emerges from the hospital “blinking like a prisoner led up from the dungeons”) and refracted through an indistinct fictional texture located somewhere between dreaming and waking. Furthermore, Banville surrounds his protagonist with both hazily remembered figures from his past and such quizzical people as the house’s vaguely menacing caretaker Quirke and its “housekeeper,” Quirke’s teenaged daughter Lily, whose identity becomes confused—as much in the reader’s mind as in Cleave’s—with the troubling remembered image of Cass, which appears to fade in harmony with the total solar eclipse that occurs near the climax.
The absence of a formal plot may frustrate many readers. But for those who hear the music of its elegant rhetoric, the encompassing dark of Eclipse may well seem light enough.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41129-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
