Not a great novel, but a good one, and a promising extension of Glass’s already impressive range.
The comforting and alienating effects of family closeness are portrayed with appealing warmth and wit in the third novel from the Massachusetts author (The Whole World Over, 2006, etc.).
It’s a tale of two sisters: city mouse Louisa Jardine, who shapes a career and an erratic love life out of her experience in New York City’s art world, and her younger sibling Clement, an ever-itinerant wildlife biologist committed only to “a wild and freewheeling life, a life of pick up and go.” In juxtaposed chapters narrated by both women, we’re privy to their mutually loving and dependent, and frequently combative, relationship over a 25-year period that begins when Louisa comes home to Vermont following the death of their nearly centenarian great-aunt Lucy, a free spirit whose intelligent independence has been a touchstone for both “Clem’s” adventurous peregrinations and Louisa’s vacillating movements toward and away from marriage and motherhood. Their mother May, a wealthy horsewoman and breeder of dogs who also manages her passive husband and influences her daughters more than they’ll admit, provides the fulcrum that keeps bringing the sisters together even when they appear to have become irreparably estranged. Glass shares Anne Tyler’s gift for comic plotting as a means to reveal character under stress, but a graver note is struck by her understanding of Louisa’s frustrating, enervating mood swings. The arc of the novel in fact isn’t comic, and its elegiac denouement and conclusion are immensely moving. There are arguably too many echoes of the patterns and emphases of Glass’s NBA-winning Three Junes, but this novel digs deeper—particularly in its rich characterization of the mercurial Clem. She’s as sentient and soulful as she is wayward and irritating, and we understand why men are drawn to her flame, then burn up in the intensity of her embracing orbit.
Not a great novel, but a good one, and a promising extension of Glass’s already impressive range.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42275-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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