Competent. Bland. If only real life were so nice.
Corman returns to the subject of his bestselling Kramer vs. Kramer (1977) in a feel-good story about the long-term results of divorce.
Rob and Karen Burrows divorced four years ago, when their son Tommy was 13. No ugly causes like adultery were involved, just the pressures of two careers colliding. Rob, who manufactures playground equipment, has remarried well: Vickie is a warmhearted, divorced mother of two. Karen, who runs a crafts-store/gallery in Manhattan’s Soho, is involved in a comfortable, undemanding relationship with Bill, a widower. As Tommy approaches high school graduation, he’s a well-adjusted, likable kid whose wit comes out in the cartoons he writes for the school paper. High-achievers that they are, Rob and Karen grudgingly accept that Tommy’s grades and SAT scores limit his college choices. He ends up at a decent small college in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, but after an unpleasant first semester experience, he breaks the news to his parents that academia is not for him. As Tommy establishes an independent blue-collar life for himself in Pittsfield, Rob realizes that he’s in danger of sinking his second marriage if he doesn’t spend more time with Vickie and her kids. Stung by Bill’s lack of interest in Tommy’s problems, Karen breaks up with him (but not to worry: another, even nicer, widower is waiting in the wings). Meanwhile, Tommy falls into a dream job with a major American artist who recognizes the boy’s artistic gifts and engineers his enrollment at Rhode Island School of Design. As Rob and Karen share their ongoing concern for their son, their friends can’t understand why they divorced. Readers may not, either. The two seldom argue, display no discomforting sexual yearnings, exhibit mild nostalgia. The tart realism of the early scenes, where the two do struggle with private disappointments and ambivalence, quickly dissipates into a sweet pudding of happy endings.
Competent. Bland. If only real life were so nice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32983-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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