Historian and novelist Ali (Redemption, 1991, etc.) charts the lives of a family of activists from the days of the Russian Revolution to the post-Wall malaise of our times. Ali is one of those rare creatures, an academic historian who has made a fairly successful transition to writing serious novels. His earlier fiction’s playfulness belied the writer’s training and roots, but this latest comes as a reminder of his Oxford/New Left Review background. The protagonist and sometime narrator is Vladimir, a former East German dissident who now finds himself as dismayed by the Germany that followed unification as he was by the half-Germany in which he lived and worked before. Vlady, as he’s often called, has been fired from his teaching post because he still believes in a democratic form of socialism, ironically the same ideal that brought him problems in the DDR. His son Karl is a rising apparatchik in the post-ideological Social Democrats, his wife has left him for reasons that will be revealed only toward novel’s end, and his old friends are dying or changing sides in a discomfiting manner. Vlady’s main response is to try to decipher the mysteries of his recently deceased mother’s past: Was his father a truly heroic figure of the old Communist movement, or something more sinister? What he—ll find, of course, is not what he expected. Ali tells this story in a pervasively melancholy tone leavened by occasional witty details such as a Sotheby’s auction whose centerpiece is a 17th-century silk condom reputed to have belonged to Louis XIV. But he’s too much of a historian to make the people here come to life as characters. Rather, they represent a series of political positions arbitrarily assigned quotas of tics that pass for psychology. Can a thoughtful and well-written novel also be a failure, and a bit of a bore? Here’s the answer.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1998
ISBN: 1-900850-10-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcadia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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