A surfeit of detail and a slow-moving plot hobble this second novel by the author of Family Values (1993). The premise is plausible and provocative: Tightly wound psychiatrist Pam Thompson discovers that her husband is having an affair with one of her clients, the suicidal Joan Dwyer, and sets out on a high-stakes quest to preserve both Dwyer and her marriage. But the need to control her emotions as well as her patient causes Thompson to mismanage the therapy, driving Dwyer ever closer to killing herself. There's plenty of room for intrigue as Pam and husband Dennis Perry alternately try to wound each other and to resurrect their relationship, while the guileless Dwyer serves as their field of battle. But David's over-rationalized schema leaves little room for the sort of surprises that would make it all fun. In all-too-appropriate keeping with the endlessly speculative nature of Thompson's psychiatric practice, much of the action is anticipated before it takes place. Rather than offering readers opportunities to make judgments or connections, David allows them only to work through a welter of agonized reflection and rationalization by all three characters. The author is conversant enough with the therapeutic process, but his workmanlike prose lacks urgency or insight, and what sex there is adds little heat to the proceedings. Excessive amounts of minutia about the characters' lives—TV shows, brand names, gourmet food—seem to be intended as cultural criticism, but such descriptions muffle the narrative's interesting turns (of which there are several). Much of the best action comes too late, after the reader's patience has worn thin. Some sharp-eyed producer will purchase movie rights to Need, hone it to essentials, inject a good deal more eroticism, and create a fine thriller; the book itself offers too few fireworks. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43433-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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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