An unfulfilling first collection containing a short story and four heavily detailed but quirky novellas, by O. Henry Prize winner and Kenyon Review contributor Sides. All five tales place lonely characters in obsessive subcultures. In the title piece, the shortest and best of the novellas, a spinsterish 40-year-old Boston-based dealer travels to Amsterdam to view two unusual picture maps—her specialty—being offered for sale, one of which, she discovers, showing the outline of an island that evokes her own buried eroticism. In ``Kites,'' a young husband on vacation with his wife, who has been trying to conceive a child, contemplates the wife's sudden passion for kites with fear and envy of the freedom they represent for her. ``The Bead Trade'' explores a middle-aged man's unrequited romantic obsession with a female sculptor whose commissioned work—carving and installing a set of giant beads made of granite boulders- -magnifies the meaning of his work, collecting and selling the small, handmade Central American beads that he's come to love. In the long (too long) novella, ``The Master of the Pink Glyphs,'' Morley—a Cambridge schoolteacher whose European lover has left her to travel and may even have died on a visit to Burma or Java—routs herself from lethargy and plans a Mexican trip that turns into an archeological expedition obscurely in his honor. And in the short story, ``Temporary Tattoos,'' Bingham, a similarly lonely young Boston businesswoman, tries to excise the memory of a lost lover by taking temporary measures—getting a washable tattoo, having an office affair—that threaten to become permanent. In all five pieces, characters' lives are not really enriched by their meticulously presented experiences; rather, their obsessions are hardened when they try to share their inner lives and can't. The result is a series of small, dusty, dim fictional worlds. A gifted writer, but hard going.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-70395-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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