The public death of Walter Mitty, alias Norman Mailer, (alias, wishfully speaking anyway, Jack Kennedy), represented by the concoction, recently serialized in Esquire, now hard-covered, bearing the title, An American Dream, bearing also the same relationship to An American Tragedy as spitballs might be said to bear to the atom bomb, is herewith reviewed. In the colloquial sense, of course, let it be stated there is no greater bomb than Dream (probably the least controversial statement of the year), which novel in its virtuoso inanity, its superlative suggestiveness, resembles, a. the unannounced second volume of Dwight MacDonald's Parodies, b. Ayn Rand discovering Freud, c. Mickey Spillane after reading Sade. The hero, Bogart re-fashioned like Paul Newman, is drenched by the Nouvelle Vague, a high-life burrower. He is also "professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation," as well as Genet-in-diapers insights ("...and I looked deeper into the eyes in the mirror as if they were keyholes... and asked myself, 'Am I now good? Am I evil forever'"). He murders his celebrity wife, runs through cat-and-mouse reels with the fuzz, bed-and-bounce deals with the broads, while his father-in-law, mysterious interlocutor of the Jet Set, CIA and the Mafia, closes in for the finale. A vaudeville liebestod, melange of eros, power and kitsch, signalizing the complete loss of control of its author. "Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;/ Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;/ What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?," asked Yeats, who never read Norman Mailer.
Pub Date: March 15, 1965
ISBN: 0375700706
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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