Cadnum (Ghostwright, 1992, etc.) tells a subtly shaded (and sometimes opaque) tale that flickers between illusion and reality, psychological and occult terror: Did Stratton Fields sell his soul for power—or are the deaths of his enemies and the triumph of his career due not to infernal intervention but to his own homicidal madness? Stratton, who narrates, is favored to win a competition to redesign Golden Gate Park: Though he's known as an architectural lightweight, his plans for the park are extraordinary; moreover, he's a scion of San Francisco's most prominent family. But Stratton learns from contest head—and old family friend—Blake Howard that the award will go to someone else because design-mogul Ty DeVere, who hates the old-moneyed Fieldses, has bribed Howard and rigged the award against Stratton. To Stratton's shock, however, the winner kills himself on TV, confessing the fix, and, the next day, Howard is found murdered—a crime the cops suspect Stratton of. Meanwhile, Stratton is haunted by an unseen presence that finally coalesces into a beautiful woman who tells him, ``Your enemies are ours,'' and then vanishes—an apparition soon followed by that of Stratton's dad, eight years dead, who warns his son to ``Accommodate Them.'' Soon after, DeVere is also dead, perhaps murdered, and Stratton's career skyrockets—but emotional disaster strikes when the architect's fiancÇe, Nona Lyle, is beaten into a coma: revenge wreaked upon Stratton by DeVere's mentor, allusive billionaire Peter Renman. Further blows follow—including revelations of familial madness and murder—as Stratton wrestles with the question of his sanity, while all along he grows in worldly and personal power—power that he can turn to good...or evil. Beautifully observed—typical of Cadnum—and effectively disturbing, though literal-minded readers will find the unresolved tightrope walk between phantasm and hallucination as frustrating as it is provocative.
Pub Date: July 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-88184-930-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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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