Taylor (The Presence of Things Past, 1992) returns with stories that aim for the perfect nuance and control of his first volume but that, this time around, seem hungry for content. Taylor revealed himself master of deceptively quiet stories that, in approaching stillness, burst into subtle and radiant meanings. Here, though, his control of tone is weaker; lines trying for the casual (—Charlene had the biggest tits in school—) are merely out of character in stories that depend on a perfect surface and impeccably delicate touch (—I imagine the night. The night is just outside the living-room window—). Some stories—many as short as a page, even a paragraph—return again to Des Moines, where Taylor’s narrator lived before going to Europe after college; others take up details of apartment-building life in provincial France. The former are very slight, like leftovers missing the depth of mood that’s essential for Taylor’s kind of minimalism. —The O—Connell Sisters— prove their crabby nature by keeping the balls and frisbees that land on their lawn—and while the reader waits for resonance, it never comes. Bits about early loves flirt with a more subtle density but are offset by surface-only stories like —Blacky’s Story——anecdotes about a childhood dog. Among the best are the very shortest, like —Musette Disappears——little more, but perfectly so, than a haunting memory-image from childhood. Curiously, Taylor’s potentially greater strength emerges not in this direction but in the deadpan humor of some of his French pieces. The tales about eccentric neighbors remain, again, mainly anecdotal, seldom rising beyond character sketches. But the longish closing piece, —The Driver’s License,— though it still doesn—t deepen in character or mood, offers a poker-faced telling of the byzantine anomalies and Catch-22’s of obtaining a driver’s license in the land of the very curious Gauls that will, indeed, make you laugh. In all, a holding pattern for a talented author waiting for a subject.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-885266-53-7
Page Count: 130
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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