In this darkly funny scuttle through academe's more covert passageways, Davies—a veteran provider of civil entertainments who's ever Jung-at-heart—first edges his people into medieval archetypes and unexpected passions, then caps the Scholarly spectacle with a splendidly horrid murder. Remote in his eyrie at the Canadian "College of St. John and the Holy Ghost" (known as "Spook"), austere medievalist Clement Hollier is oblivious to the adoration of a lovely grad student: half-gypsy Maria Theotky. (Though once, inexplicably, he "had" her on the sofa.) And Maria's narration alternates with that of Anglican priest/professor Simon Darcourt, who, along with Hollier, is one of Maria's "rebel angels"— those who "taught the daughters of men" after being exiled from Heaven. But she is also fascinated by the verbal stilettos of newly-arrived "Brother John" Pariabane: a Spook alumnus and self-de-frocked monk, a brilliant Doctor of Philosophy, an "important bum. . . a cultivated sponger," a bamboozler and mocking asp. So, while Darcourt chronicles academic monstrosities (including the prize-winning work of a modern alchemist working with human excrement) and Hollier boils with rage at nasty Renaissance scholar Urky McVarish (who has stolen a priceless Rabelais ms.), passions and jealousies brew. Soon there are even exotic visits to Maria's gypsy mother—as Hollier requests curses and Darcourt pants with love for Maria (due to a misdirected love potion). And finally: Parlabane, in a cloud of sulphurous malefactions, wipes Urky and himself from the Earth; Simon comes to his senses; Hollier recognizes love too late; and Maria settles for true love with a nice young rich man. Along the way Davies teases the modern scholars' "conventionality," playfully casting back to the saucy scholars of old. And though for rather a special audience, this is saucy stuff indeed—swept with vaporous invention and fertile with miraculous minnows of donnish wit.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1981
ISBN: 0140062718
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1981
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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