Long remains in Montana for his first novel (Blue Spruce, stories, 1995), the pleasant, homely tale of a young man without a family of his own who gets mixed up—in more ways than one—with the daughters of a Greek-American restaurant owner. Mark Singer's father died in a bar brawl and his mother disappeared, so he came to be raised—during the 1940s—by his grandmother in the town of Sperry, Montana. And where was his favorite place to pass the time? Well, the Vagabond Cafe, owned and run by Nick Stavros with the help of his wife (until her death in 1947) and four daughters, these being, from oldest to youngest, Linny (short for Evangeline), Celia, Olivia, and tomboy Helen. It's 1952 when the story opens with Mark's marriage (at 22) to the serious-minded and sweetly domestic if moody Olivia, who gives him two kids in fairly quick time, but who doesn't—well, keep life compelling enough to prevent Mark from falling into the arms and bed of long-limbed, restless oldest-sister Linnie upon her sudden return from a handful of incognito years (she'd even missed Celia's wedding) in the beatnik streets and alleys of San Francisco. As for plot, there's not much more. Mark's passion, however, and his guilt mount in almost equal degree, until one night, ``as if he's doing them all an enormous service,'' he tells all to an Olivia who's already been deeply depressed of late. A third of the novel is left, and let it only be said that all works out in an oddly undramatic but satisfying way—and that, from start to end, there's a steady feast of detail to be supped on as Mark goes through workdays (as a contractor's helper), night drives, outings into the countryside, and trips into memory. A closely observed tale of domestic life that remains real all the way through.
Pub Date: June 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80034-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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