Just's (The Translator, 1991, etc.) tenth novel is one of his best. It's about a driven artist, a woman, who has chosen what Yeats called ``perfection...of the work.'' Harry Forrest, American expatriate, successful writer, is admiring the elegant Frenchwoman in the Paris museum when she identifies herself as Georgia Whyte, a Chicago native just like Harry. What follows is the story of her life since their only other meeting, years before back home. In 1968 she'd been an art student, scrutinizing the Winnetka country-club crowd so as to ``lay bare Chicago's hypocrisy'' on canvas. Her Chicago paintings didn't sell, so she moved to Los Angeles, where obnoxious movie producer Ed Smid paid top dollar for her ``product'' and promised fame if she'd do his portrait. But Georgia made art, not deals, even if her refusal meant losing her charming, corruptible boyfriend, Ed's assistant. She found temporary refuge with some surfers. For them, nothing existed but the waves; for Georgia, the canvas. After another spell in Chicago, she moved to Paris and lived reclusively. The only man in her life was a general; he was on horseback, his statue framed by her window. Georgia tried to wrestle him onto canvas, with the help of the ever-present Calvados, until she became deathly ill and was rescued by her neighbor, Alfred, a jazz pianist, and suddenly found herself in love with this gallant loser. A doomed affair, Harry thinks, but he's wrong again. When last heard from, the two bohemians and their baby are living happily in the provinces. What her enemies had seen as Georgia's ``cold heart'' had been her pure artist's soul. Georgia, a fine creation, is both type and individual. Her unceasing creative struggle, that of any artist, is integrated with her personal odyssey in a tightly focused story teeming with credible surprises from a writer at the height of his powers. (First serial to Esquire)
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-68196-0
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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
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