As the title suggests, this is a small handful of early pieces by Elkin (three short stories and a brief memoir-essay), including his very first published story, "A Sound of Distant Thunder," which appeared originally in Epoch magazine. Never a man to puff himself up, Elkin has supplied an introduction to the volume in which he announces brightly that "The three pieces in this collection. . .are not, I'm afraid, very good. Indeed, with the possible exception of 'Fifty Dollars,' they are no good at all." But Elkin, as usual, knows what he's doing. After such candor as this, who among us can resist taking at least a little peak? The memoir-essay, for example, which appeared in Antaeus and is called "Where I Read What I read." Here's a peek at Stanley Elkin, indeed, telling about his graduate-student days and, before those, about his Army time—including the long-ago day in Colorado in the 1950s, on bivouac in the mountains, when he managed, after trench-digging duty, to sneak off under the pine trees to read Thomas Mann's "Mario the Magician." "I was astounded," he reveals, "by how beautifully men could write, stunned by how they could imagine worlds so much more beautiful, if not more comfortable, than even this one. . . This was the happiest day of my life." "Bill Bamberger is willing to put this stuff between covers," Elkin writes. "I sign fifty copies of the press run and—at least that's the assumption—a few dozen people will be willing to pay a small premium to have it in their libraries." Well, sure. After all, there's life in this unpretentious little volume, a thread of melancholy woven into the drollery, and a few pieces of early Elkin for those who want to see what they're like, or to make their collection complete.
Pub Date: July 1, 1985
ISBN: 0917453034
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Bamberger Books
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1985
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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