Wadsworth seems afraid to venture outside straightforward narrative realism—the characters we care about disappear well...
A sometimes charming but more often inefficient debut about “a fifty-nine-year-old woman, happily married, infatuated with a young woman half her age.”
Mrs. Medina married Mr. Medina, a famous cellist, when she was 36 and he almost 60. It’s now two-and-a-half decades later, and while Patrick is on his way out, Mercedes is just hitting cruising speed. The two have had enough of a wonderful life that Mrs. Medina worries over the size of the chunks of meat that she cuts for her husband and closely monitors the one cigar he’s allowed each month. Still, when Mercedes’ latent instincts awaken with the arrival of Lennie, a young beautiful woman who works in a local flower store and who may have some dirty dealings, the impulse cannot be ignored. Mercedes confides in a university colleague, and it’s nice to know that even at the highest reaches of academia the simple phrase “I think I’m in love” can cause the stuffiest of intellectuals to abandon their scholarship and titter like teenagers. Mrs. Medina even tells Patrick about the affair—but not to worry: Patrick has an eye for the young “stacked” ones, too, and he’s a good sport about it. Patrick becomes a consistent source of humor and poignancy, and his portrait as a lesson on aging is worth the price of admission—but he’s not the main character. Mercedes’ affair comes and goes, and Patrick dies, and it’s a good thing that only the rich become lovelorn because in this world a broken heart is a serious condition requiring expensive therapy and a live-in cook. Mercedes in truth seems a little light. When she is slow to catch on to Lennie’s shenanigans, it undermines her weight as a serious intellect. Final message? Everyone loves beautiful young women—good thing there are enough to go around.
Wadsworth seems afraid to venture outside straightforward narrative realism—the characters we care about disappear well before the end.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55583-633-X
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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.
