Crammed with literary and philosophical allusions, this postmodern novel by the author of Women (1990) is as tedious and self-important as a loquacious tippler's 3 a.m. monologue. Pierre Froissart, a French writer who has turned his hand to smuggling stolen art (in this case, a Watteau), is passing languid days in a Venetian villa with a beauteous physics student, Luz, while he awaits orders for the completion of the deal. His meandering reveries form the bulk of this plotless novel. Pierre mostly indulges in self-justifying musings on the philistinism of a society that values art only as a commodity. He also meditates on the youthful freshness of Luz and the brittle sophistication of Geena, who introduced him to the haute world of stolen art. He ranges nonstop over a dizzying variety of people and ideas: Spinoza, France, Hitler, colonial laws in Martinique, Hemingway, Warhol, and time travel all figure in the text. It's not at all clear whether this crowd of references is intended to inform, dazzle, obscure, or stupefy. Along the way, Pierre makes some memorable observations, such as this one on the charm of Watteau's paintings: ``The figure in the carpet, the purloined letter, the grey-plated and pale pink web draped in silver, the mercury whose secret has apparently been lost, the key to the departure hidden in folds and more folds, the finger on the lips.'' In criticizing contemporary vacuity, he offers this possibly self-reflective advice: ``You want to write your memoirs? Easy: recall the dullest memories possible which anyone might have had, employing the maximum of clichÇs... Success!'' The novel's essence may be distilled into another quote: ``Question: What should intellectuals do? Answer: Defend complexity. Objection: But if you repeat a sentence over and over, even that one, doesn't it become a clichÇ? Answer: So what?'' Question: If reading this novel is an exercise in masochism, was writing it a sadistic act? Answer: Really, who cares?
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19451-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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