Despite the soap-opera finish at hospital bedside, a cozy story of three likable artists on the up and up.
An engaging second from actress O’Connor (Like China, 1990) is a roman á clef about the mercurial careers and emotional histrionics of three inseparable New York actors in the late 1970s.
The three first meet at a hotly competitive actors’ workshop run by suave, sneering Andre Sadovsky in upstairs Carnegie Hall: narrator Robert Holt is a driven perfectionist from New Jersey whose mother was a Rockette and father deserted the family when Robert was two; tall gay Patrick O’Doherty is a former Broadway dancer whose scary secret sex life will eventually fray relations among them all; and fresh from Coffeyville, Kansas, at just 21, Irene Jane Walpers is the natural ingénue. The three pal around town as charmingly improvident artists, sharing apartments, tips on auditions, and moral support; they become hand-picked protégés of Andre, who runs the exclusive summer-arts festival in Connecticut where Robert and Irene’s flirtation is interrupted by Andre’s whisking her away to live with him as assistant of the hour and traveling companion. Further tensions are introduced when Patrick, a pathological liar who can’t find his true role, takes to his bed in depression for days after rejection or vanishes for nights of cruising, then reappears badly beaten up. O’Connor knows her stuff—getting the agent runaround, understudying for actors who won’t move over, sleeping with people to get connections, landing the cushy job in a soap opera that turns into a sorry career. Entering her gritty Hell’s Kitchen of the hand-to-mouth actor is like watching a documentary of a bygone New York. Eventually, success strikes the one we least expect, Robert, who picks up women in department stores: he feels he’s lost to his friends when he moves out to LA, yet he can’t change his true nature, which is love of good roles—and Irene and Patrick.
Despite the soap-opera finish at hospital bedside, a cozy story of three likable artists on the up and up.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-373-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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