A savage, often unfunny and unfocused adieu to sex—at least as it's practiced in the "permissive society." Jake is a 59-year-old Oxford don (ancient Mediterranean history), and his "thing" is his penis, which has been failing him lately with fat wife Brenda. This problem takes him into the world of flaky psychotherapy. . . and pictorial pornography—since one of the measures recommended by smarmy, boyishly Irish Dr. Rosenberg is the study of dirty pictures "on at least three occasions for a minimum of fifteen minutes at a time. See that this leads to masturbation at least once, preferably twice." Jake finds today's gross porn thoroughly un-erotic; nor is he stimulated much by the rest of Dr. Rosenberg's therapeutic program: "nongenital sensate-focusing," writing out sex fantasies, monitoring sleep-time erections with a "nocturnal mensurator," and enduring the talky-touchy-feely of a "Workshop" encounter group. ("If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's 'Workshop.' After 'Youth,' that is.") But Jake does soon find himself fully functional one surprising night up at Oxford—with an old flame who, though she inspires his quasi-lust, is otherwise a total disappointment: "I mistook her egotism for sparkle. . . her cheap jeering for healthy disrespect. . . ." In fact, Jake realizes how little he cares for women in general—Oxford is being picketed by feminists, Jake's wife takes off with a fatuous friend; and, when Jake's problem is at last diagnosed correctly (a treatable hormone problem), he does a run-down on female foulness and decides to leave well enough alone and remain contentedly impotent. Does all this work—as satire, character comedy, or polemic? Not really. Because Amis' primary targets are a bit dated (in the U.S. anyway) and obvious. Became Jake is an inconsistent alter ego, sometimes a clear mouthpiece (in tirades on today's sexual mores), sometimes a bit of a cartoon himself (in his self-proclaimed chauvinist-pigdom). And because Amis' shot-gun contempt—for illiterate students, bad cafeteria food, etc.—keeps pulling the whole book down to a level of unfocused tetchiness. The Amis prose glitters throughout as shark-toothily as ever, but the Amis bile isn't the geyser it once was-more like a leaky faucet.
Pub Date: June 26, 1980
ISBN: 0140050965
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1979
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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