Long-separated lovers reunite in a quiet Catskill Mountains resort town, but precious pretty prose and you-had-to-be-there nostalgia fail to set readers' hearts aflutter. Kay (To Dance with the White Dog, 1990) takes as his protagonist Bobo Murphy, an artist in his 50s who has spent all his life in the South—except for one memorable summer in 1955 when, as a recent high school graduate, he waited tables at the Pine Hill Inn in the Catskills' Shandaken Valley. For nearly five decades, Bobo has clung to his memories of that idyllic summer—the one time, he feels, when he was truly happy and alive. When he learns of the death of Avrum Feldman, Pine Hill's oldest eccentric and his close friend, Bobo grabs the chance to return to Pine Hill and have another look around. He is saddened to find that the old resort hotel and village, whose cultured German-Jewish visitors and clever, wisecracking employees had once seemed as exotic to this Georgia farmboy as Timbuktu, are now a seedy backwater, as barren and dull as his own life. Explorations of the town bring to mind Bobo's first encounters with old Avrum, whose romantic obsession with a famous opera singer inspired the 17-year-old Bobo to woo and almost win a beautiful young Jewish woman named Amy Lourie at the hotel. As he relives that passion, which ended when he returned south to marry a girl back home, Bobo is overwhelmed by regret. Luckily, Amy has also heard of Avrum's death. She appears, ready and willing to give Bobo a second chance at joy. Kay has a gift for evoking beauty in the mundane, but it's still hard to fall for a romantic hero named Bobo. (Literary Guild selection; film rights to Warner Bros.; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-89261-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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