Here, more than ever, Adams (Listening to Billie, Beautiful Girl) seems to be dressing up women's-magazine fiction as serious literary work—with some style but little real authority. The lady in romantic disarray this time is 40-year-old Daphne, long-divorced and big-breasted and new to San Francisco—where she's come to be custodian/renovator/decorator in her old chum Agatha's just-purchased house in posh Pacific Heights. (Agatha's late father, a shady General, has left her a fortune.) And Daphne is determined to do without men for a while, since she's "addicted to even the most miserable forms of love": past lover Jake was a junkie; recent lover Derek is a pig; only Jean-Paul of Paris, her adulterous love of long ago, was a sweetie (not to mention "the beautiful unforgettable shape of his cock"), but she let him get away—and now he's a "leading Socialist economic theorist." Still, Daphne, who has made "a career out of personal relationships," does let herself get somewhat emotionally involved. She has sexy fantasies about "beautiful" carpenter Tony—who turns out, alas, to be a sometime homosexual prostitute. She meets the Houston family: handsome blond Royce (who'll have an affair with physician Agatha), dark wife Ruth (who'll temporarily go mad), wool-sculptor Caroline (who'll turn lesbian), flaky son Whitey (who'll beat up Caroline and then go off to Alaska to get killed in a fight). And finally Daphne will discover that old flame Jean-Paul is teaching at Berkeley—so there's a Clairol-commercial reunion ("We praised and blessed each other, for everything") with a happy fadeout. . . though J-P may have a terminal disease. What does all this add up to? Very little, despite an attempt to relate Daphne's "emotional temperature-taking" to "the proliferation of violence" in the 1970s (not only the Houston family, but also a possible link between Agatha's money and the murder of Chile's Allende!)—an awkward stab at metaphor even less convincing than the use of Billie Holliday in Listening to Billie. Nor does Daphne's narrative strongly engage on the simplest storytelling level: the supporting cast remains faceless (partly because of Adams' limited-vocabulary obsession with "beautiful" people); there's no tension, despite heavy foreshadowing throughout; and Adams seems never to have decided whether archly self-centered narrator Daphne is a character or just a generalized alter ego. Painless—but the thinnest work yet from an initially alluring, superficially polished, increasingly banal and repetitive writer.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1980
ISBN: 0449146529
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
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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