is one of them.
Following up on his successful cookbook-cum-mystery (The Debt to Pleasure, 1996), Lanchester offers an end-of-the-century
version of Mrs. Dalloway—with results as brilliantly captivating as Michael Cunningham’s were in The Hours. Victor Phillips, married with two sons, lives in a London far different from Clarissa Dalloway’s—more populous and polluted, more clogged with traffic, more ridden with crime—and yet a city that’s much unchanged. To show this sameness within differences, Lanchester imitates Woolf by using the method that she (and James Joyce) made new, following his character through a day of wandering through the city. The reader, thus, meets Mr. Phillips waking beside his wife early one Monday morning in July, follows his thoughts in the closest—often most droll—detail as he thinks about sex on the one hand and, on the other, about the oppressive noise of the airliners coming in overhead for landings at Heathrow. This dichotomy—life-force versus mechanized, modern oppression of life—will accompany Mr. Phillips through the last step he takes in the book. Indeed, the reader soon enough learns that Mr. Phillips, fiftysomething, has himself, after three decades as an accountant with the catering firm of Wilkins and Co., been declared "redundant" and let go. This is dehumanizing news that he can’t face telling Mrs. Phillips, and so it is, dressed for work and carrying his briefcase, that he traverses London to fill the hours. His tragicomic odyssey takes him (like Mrs. Dalloway) through the park, where he meets not a WWI victim but a victim of another kind; he later sees a famous person; meets his older son for lunch; visits a pornography theater; undergoes danger; experiences coincidence; has a remarkable epiphany; returns home. Some books—often those showing the importance of unimportant things—pale in the telling and soar in the reading. Lanchester’s capable, knowledgeable, revelatory homage to Mrs. Woolf and Mr. Joyce (and even to Mr. Eliot’s "unreal city")
is one of them.Pub Date: April 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14604-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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
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