A finely drawn story of a woman losing everything and finding herself.
A woman’s unraveling life prompts her to explore her unlikely past in this literary novel by Averbach (Missing Persons, 2013, etc.), former director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center in Chautauqua, New York.
College librarian Deena Berman’s life is thrown into chaos when her husband’s poor investment decisions cost the family their beautiful home in Shaker Heights, Ohio. While packing up for the move, Deena comes across her old college application essay, which tells the story of her unusual childhood. Her lesbian mother, Leah Marcus, rejected her own affluent upbringing in order to live the life of a hippie, renaming herself Rain and living in a same-sex relationship on the New Moon Commune outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Deena was born. Deena left New Moon as a teenager, but as an adult, she faces new problems. Among other things, she loses her job after she’s suspected of stealing books, and her marriage to her husband, Martin, falls apart. Her son, Elliot, decides to join the Navy now that they can’t afford to send him to college. Her daughter, Lauren, moves in with punks and exhibits some of the countercultural tendencies that Rain did. As the setbacks pile up, Deena follows a photography professor—with whom she’s had a brief affair—to Sarasota, Florida. Things go from bad to worse, and Deena begins to unpack the secrets of her upbringing, confronting for the first time the woman her mother really was—and the woman she is as well. Averbach unspools her story with dark humor and a mounting sense of calamity. Her prose is measured yet vigorous, capturing the chagrin Deena feels with each new humiliation: “She needed help. The problem was that Martin wasn’t taking her calls. He hadn’t spoken to her since the night Elliot had unraveled the lie she’d been living. It was horrific how swiftly that idle dalliance had turned her life inside out.” Averbach approaches Deena’s problems with restraint and seriousness and has things to say about materialism and self-exploration. While some of the conclusions feel a bit preordained, any lessons take a back seat to an organic and quite captivating plot.
A finely drawn story of a woman losing everything and finding herself.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-936135-82-0
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Golden Antelope Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© 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.
