Prose's satirical eye focuses on what should have been an excellent targeta cult of goddess-worshippers intent on healing a lovelorn female's heartbut she fails to hit home with the gleeful vigor so evident in Primitive People (1992) and Bigfoot Dreams (1986). Having just turned 30, crushed to find that she's still just an underpaid fact-checker at a New York fashion magazine, and recovering from yet another destructive love affair at that, Martha is spending a solitary weekend at Fire Island when she stumbles across a wacky-looking, all-female druid ceremony taking place on the beach. Noticing that the group's leader is drowning in the chilly waves, Martha spontaneously saves her lifeand is thus sucked into the maelstrom of a fervent goddess-worshipping cult peopled with pseudo-academic oddballs named Hegwitha, Titania, Freya, Isis Moonwagon, and so on. Clearly, the situation has comic potential, and the cast of female fanatics has been provocatively assembled. But Prose can find little for them to do following this encounter. Though Martha tags dutifully along, helping celebrate the solstice, spouting mangled revisionist feminist history and female-centric jargon, and participating in some routine backstabbing and weepy late-night confession fests, the goddess- worshippers' antics never amount to much more than an occasional silly line or ho-hum revelation. Meanwhile, Martha's character remains paper-thin, and the worshippers themselves never move beyond sketchy caricature, as they travel to Arizona for a doomed encounter with Native American healer Maria Aquilo (``Maria does vision quest. She does sweat lodge. She does dream work and Talking Stick and drumming and spirit dance intensive''). In the end, Prose solves her heroine's problems by sending an eligible male down the desert road to rescue heran anticlimax for the reader as much as for Martha's loony friends. An execution as inexplicably lifeless as its heroineand a disappointment from this highly gifted author.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-17371-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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