Hairpin turns on Piranesi paragraphs that often climb nowhere and twist the brain into taffy. Wonder full.
A sheaf of Mathews’s artifacts from the past twenty years or so, perhaps only for connoisseurs of the gold-packed sentence, including early stories from Country Cooking (1980), midcareer stories from The American Experience (1984), plus ten fresh new pieces (Singular Pleasures, 1993).
The collection opens gloriously with a story not for everyone, a factual fiction that flows from Mathews’s 1952 Harvard degree in music: 1980’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent: The ‘Bratislava Spicatto’ ”—a cellular fantasia on late-romantic conductors, composers, artists, and their familial crossbreeding (the floating affinity of who’s related to whom), which tells of the invention of the Russian mode of unplucked pizzicato bowing on the violin—or maybe we’ve got that wrong, but, aside from its convivial linguistics as it follows the webbings of talent among musical artists, it bears no tie to T.S. Eliot’s famous 1922 essay of the same name (minus the subcolonnic “The ‘Brataslava Spiccato’ ”). “The Dialect of the Tribe” gives a supremely tortuous look into Pagolak, the language of a remote New Guinea tribe that refuses to translate and, indeed, means to be untranslatable, unless you approach it with “a ripeness as for dying”—and even that won’t be enough. “Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)” is quite likely the best satire on cookbooks ever written and focuses on shoulder of lamb with double stuffing (farce double). “The Taxidermist” tells of a woman who charges a flat rate and, when done, tips up “the flag of her antique taxi meter on her bedside table.” One cannot read all these stories at once, however brief the book, and couldn’t even at half this length. The mind can hold just so much surrealism at a time before it waddles about doubly stuffed with farce double.
Hairpin turns on Piranesi paragraphs that often climb nowhere and twist the brain into taffy. Wonder full.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2002
ISBN: 1-56478-321-9
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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