In this (for Whitney) overly talky and cluttered mystery/suspense novel, set in a scenic area of western North Carolina, a young widow from California sets out to discover the true story of two deaths decades apart. Lauren Castle's late husband, filmmaker Jim, has been accidentally killed while working on a documentary concerning the career of fabled actor Roger Brandt, who still lives on beautiful Lake Lure. In 1938, the movie idol had made a film—as well as a child—with his lover, the lovely Victoria Fraser. The child was raised elsewhere, and Victoria, presumably distraught that Roger would stay forever with his wife, Camilla, committed suicide. Or did she? Lauren, meanwhile, has told no one except former boyfriend Gordon (now a forest ranger) that she is the granddaughter of Victoria and Roger. Now in North Carolina to sleuth, Lauren pinballs here and there, picking up bits of info and chatting with: blunt but chummy Gretchen Fraser, Victoria's sister; Gordon's mother Finella, who's heavily into making products from the kudzu vine; Natalie Brandt, Roger's daughter, an artist who has painted a spooky picture of a UFO-like object landing on the local mountain peak; Camilla, who introduces Lauren to Victoria's old dresser, Betty; and hirsute Ty, Gretchen's brother, who is mighty strange and beats drums in the wild. At the close, when all's made plain, there's a climb to what might be a sky-high grave. This time the story seems crowded, and Whitney has not allowed her mob of suspects space and time; readers may feel overwhelmed by the plethora of chat and surfeit of chatterers. But even the best of the pros can lob one into the underbrush—not that Whitney's following will care. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for Fall)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-59499-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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