Jarring and beautiful, this is a modern classic.
Style and setting allow some beauty to intrude on this story of love, loss, and how low one might stoop to right a wrong.
Bette lives alone in Greenwich Village, stewing over her family's rejection and denial of a grave betrayal. Across the hall, Earl struggles to find work as an actor; in 1958, being black restricts his choices, and being gay means hiding even more of his desires. These two form a family of sorts as later middle age approaches, but when Bette's cousin Hortense enters their lives, the initial novelty festers into something grim. Schulman (The Mere Future, 2009, etc.) takes chances with style and structure. The word jazz that pops and crackles in occasional street scenes is overlaid with what she describes in an afterword as the stilted British voice that marks many works in translation. She also writes herself into the story as the squalling newborn down the hall; her crying precipitates a vital scene. Bette's integrity quickly comes undone when she feels she's been wronged (by Earl and Hortense but also by her family back home), and her work in the evolving field of television advertising offers her a thoroughly modern set of tools with which to wreak destruction. There are times when her manipulations are hard to watch yet impossible to turn away from; her victories, though hard-won, are full of contradictions, and Earl’s actions are no less complicated. Yet all this drama is grown from shared cups of tea, poetry, and late-night conversations, commiserations about jobs and romance, the long roots of an established friendship. It testifies to the elegant construction of the novel that it can balance the hopes of an entire era on the backs of a fragile relationship and leave no doubt as to its resilience.
Jarring and beautiful, this is a modern classic.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55861-904-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
PROFILES
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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