Smartly done, at times deeply felt.
Editor Bright asks three writers to face a life-changing sexual event.
Most skilled here is William Harrison (the magnetic Mountains of the Moon, the magnificent The Blood Latitudes), who often writes about Africa when not presenting a futuristic action fantasy like The Roller Ball Murders. In “Shadow of a Man,” set in South Africa the year before Mandela’s release, Texan photographer Cal Vega is invited to Johannesburg to photograph an elderly retired general; his daughter wants the picture. Cal is a philosopher of the camera and has intriguing if cynical views about his art. Ellen, the general’s daughter, seduces Cal and takes him off to her beachfront home. Her sexual enjoyment turns on fantasy: she’s 15 and Cal is her 14-year-old brother, and so on. She takes him to a big party, mixed whites and blacks, and the real object of her seduction turns out to be that she wants many pictures of those at the party, because one is a mole. All turns tragic, and Cal’s thoughts focus on the shadow within, and on his stupid, stupid, stupid philosophy. Greg Boyd, relating “The Widow,” splits his page in half and on the top tells of “Karen Regent,” a widow who secretly writes a pornographic novel to make up for her nonorgasmic life, while on the bottom Boyd simultaneously tells her husband’s story after discovering and reading the book on the wife’s hard drive. In Karen’s novel, she goes off to France to recover from grief, discovers masturbation, and is seduced by a French photographer. In the sub-story, the shocked husband, not dead, tells of reading his wife Mandy’s tale and his rock-hard erection. Rawest of all, Tsaurah Litzky’s “The Motion of the Ocean” leaps from her brother’s bar mitzvah to 30 years later as the heroine more or less makes sense of her sex life while fitting photos into a fat new album. More sex in this one than in the other two combined.
Smartly done, at times deeply felt.Pub Date: July 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4549-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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