Debut British novel about smoking (or not) that's a long nicotine fit gasping for a more smooth-flavored, high-tar story. To occupy his hands over a 20-day period of not smoking, Gregory Simpson writes 20 patchwork chapters rather than play with little paper tubes. Among his pains is the loss of the post-coital cigarette—his girlfriend Lucy informs him that for her smoking and not smoking is the difference between entry and no entry. Meanwhile, Gregory's next-door neighbor and best friend, tobacco researcher Dr. Julian Carr, phones, saying nothing, just to let Gregory listen to him smoke. Lucy herself often pops over to Julian's for a smoke . . . and whatever. She tries all manner of devices to get Gregory to inhale but at last leaves him when—after giving him her body—he refuses to join her in the p-c smoke. To forget her, Gregory goes off to Paris, gets a job in a library, and meets Ginny, a budding American opera singer who keeps her lungs pure for the art. Ginny is jealous of Gregory's ex-girlfriend, though, thinks only of him kissing Lucy's smoke-filled mouth and tarry lips, and at last smokes a cigarette to seduce the reluctant Gregory. He finally leaves her, however, and returns to London. Much of the novel concerns tobacco research by Gregory's close friends, a pair of doctors. Gregory, who once led the Suicide Club, valiant smokers aligned against LUNG antismokers, figures that during the next ten years of not smoking a pack a day he will not smoke 73,057 cigarettes (365 x 20 x 10), which includes two packs for leap years (20 x 2). Also in withdrawal, his dog Haemoglobin whines for dirty ashtrays and secondhand smoke. Very witty but utterly endless, like The Magic Mountain by S.J. Perelman.
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-399-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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
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
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