Virginia and Buddy, the college couple who ``had to'' get married in Thomas's debut collection, Getting Over Tom (1994), are back, a year older and initially no wiser. The summer of 1960 is sizzling, but every bit of heat has gone out of this young couple's marriage as they return with their almost year-old daughter, Madeline, to Buddy's hometown, Hadley, New Jersey, to stay with his Aunt Dot. Right away, Virginia finds confirmation of her old suspicion that Buddy is still deeply attached to his old high-school girlfriend, Irene. It doesn't seem to slow the two down that Irene is now married to Buddy's good friend Chick. As the summer progresses, Virginia finds herself more and more estranged from her silent, moody husband. She flees for a while to Massachusetts to stay with her parents, but when it becomes clear that they aren't going to provide her with a way out, Virginia heads back to Buddy to try once more. On the surface, this is disarmingly simple stuff—the perils of young marriage. But Thomas mines deeper and delivers more. Her depiction of Virginia's parents, not quite callous but exquisitely bundled in their own self-absorption, is chilling and wonderful. Irene and Buddy too, to a lesser degree, grow beyond their easy-to-hate adulterous roles into more complex characters. And, finally, there is Virginia herself, who narrates in a voice that's right on pitch for a 19- year-old mother in 1960: self-righteous, slightly priggish, and, at times, heartbreakingly naive. The changes she makes as she goes along are tiny but meaningful, and by the close—an ending that both is and isn't a surprise—we see that Virginia, who started out as a bit of a dim bulb, may be a firecracker after all. The aftermath of a 1950s shotgun marriage may not be a new story, but this one, quietly told, resonates in a powerful way. A heartfelt first novel.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-133-3
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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