In Return Trips, her third collection of short stories, Adams works with people on the move, some returning to familiar places, others taking the ultimate trip from which they will not return. Adams' familiar theme of weather—crazy California heat and cold, Mexican sun, Alaskan darkness—is predictably sounded in each of these stories. Weather, even in its changeability, will always be with us, unlike love or sexuality. Predictable, too, is Adams' concentration on polarities: east and west; north and south; young and old; fat and thin. This works well in "Mexican Dust," where Miriam, a size-three, dark-haired woman, finally assumes stature over her three large, fair-haired traveling companions by achieving a clarity of vision none of them quite possesses. It works less well in "Barcelona," where Adams' attempt to make a significant comparison between rich and poor men results in the merely facile. In one of her better stories, "Waiting for Stella," contradictions are neatly played out: the discomfort of intense waiting; the sense of disappointment when the wait is over, of even misery as something to miss. At the story's conclusion, young naive Day (a day visitor, suggesting youth lasts but a day) believes everything is understood and settled while the far wiser and Older Rachel knows nothing is. "New Best Friends," a very fine story, relates the end of a Yankee/southern alliance that, like a vaccination, never quite took. The northern husband's flash of danger, quickly perceived and as quickly dismissed (characteristic of Adams' men), warns him that he, too, may soon become an ending in his wife's life. If these 14 well-crafted stories have more scope than depth, more style than passion, Adams aficionados will not be disappointed in the quality of the writing or the acuity of detail.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1985
ISBN: 0449209539
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
