The documentary muse of northern California's artistic upper-middle-class (Second Chances, 1988, etc.) toys with but never tackles the dangerous, fashionable issue of incest. The story—such as it is—goes like this: Caroline, a handsome affluent woman in her 60s, is returning to San Francisco with her third husband, Ralph, after a five-year sojourn in Portugal, taken so that Caroline could separate herself from the dramas of her five grown daughters: Sage, a pale, stooped potter of 40, who five years ago was having a disastrous affair with an older local pol named Roland Gallo and who since has married a flirt (and worse) named Noel; Fiona, petite, blond, and chic, proud owner of a trendy S.F. restaurant named after herself, who now is having her own affair with Roland Gallo; Jill, slightly younger facsimile of Fiona, an investment banker and part-time call-girl who is carrying on an affair with (yes) Noel; Liza, married, with three children, and worrisome only because she seems so contented; and young Portia, only daughter of Caroline and Ralph, who's been drifting until she discovers she's a lesbian. Well, Ralph dies of a heart attack: Sage attempts to seduce her stepfather, Caroline's second husband Jim McAndrew, and, when she fails, divorces Noel and becomes rich and famous from her pottery; Fiona's restaurant goes under, and Fiona is jilted by Gallo, who (it turns out) has always really lusted after Caroline; Jill is caught in a call-girl sting and later suffers injuries in a car accident with Noel; Liza publishes a short story; Portia inherits a house and takes a woman lover; and Caroline flees to Italy, with Roland Gallo in hot pursuit. In case all this leads you to imagine that Adams's latest has a plot—it doesn't. But it does have lots of food and wine, plenty of architecture, and constant emotional innuendo delivered in the author's patented mannered prose.
Pub Date: March 22, 1991
ISBN: 0671028480
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991
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
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
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