A light comedic debut that’s all too familiar for the genre.
Daydreams of that perfect someone, a romantic wedding and a better job: sounds like another chick-lit summer read, but this time our heroine is a he.
At 32, Henry Mann is a little anxious. Everyone he knows seems to be tying the knot; this year alone he’s been to eight weddings. But ever since his breakup with Sheila, his love life has been as barren as the Gobi Desert. It becomes quickly evident that Henry’s real life would be more gratifying if he spent less time on his quixotic fantasy life, which runs the gamut from elaborate wedding scenarios to winning a Tony for the musical he’s writing. Each of the novel’s chapters bears the name of a fantasy woman, though only two are appropriate bridal material. Tamar is exciting but flaky; she dumps Henry after their first date, claiming she’s a lesbian, but in fact she just used him to make her married boyfriend jealous. Christine, though funny and smart, has a unibrow, and that, according to Henry’s standards, is a deal breaker. No matter: Tamar gives marching orders to her married man, and soon she and Henry have a real-life relationship. She helps him with his musical (an adaptation of The Great Gatsby featuring such soon-to-be hits as “My Pink Suit” and “My Honey Got Money”) and encourages him to explore his long-hidden, hipper self, which results in a yellow stripe dyed in his dark hair. Can it last? Should Henry propose? And what about Christine, still waiting in the wings? Henry is an affable character, and the novel has its fair share of laugh-out-loud moments, though occasionally the narrative is weighed down by one too many of his musings. Moreover, despite the long masturbation scene, there is something disappointingly feminine about this male perspective.
A light comedic debut that’s all too familiar for the genre.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33943-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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
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