A junior-league Catherine M. bound to raise just as many eyebrows on this side of the Atlantic. One can only imagine where...
Just when you thought you were proof against sex scandals, the young Ms. P., reportedly 16 at the time of writing, obliges with a remarkable two-year sexual odyssey.
The narrator is a schoolgirl whose first sexual experiences involve looking at herself in the mirror with love and admiration. Melissa has friends who touch themselves and dream of giving themselves to boys, but she’s in no hurry for a relationship—she wants to be “lovely, brilliant, poetic.” For better or worse, the acquaintances who soon take her through the gate of the secret garden supply quite a different range of encounters. Daniele is a callow student indifferent to her needs and wishes. Roberto, the law student, is more articulate, but his gentleness turns to brutality behind closed doors. Fabrizio, the 35-year-old married man she meets in a “Perverse Sex” chat room (many of Melissa’s adventures depend on cutting-edge technology), thinks he’s given her everything just because he’s offered to set her up in an apartment. Melissa finds tenderness only with her transvestite friend Ernesto, her lesbian friend Letizia, and Valerio, the math professor who insists on calling her Lolita and himself Humbert. What’s most remarkable about this staggeringly assured debut, however, is not the sexual smorgasbord—voyeurism, sadomasochism, group sex, etc., etc.—but the utter lack of any distractions from sex (family, school, friendships) recorded in Melissa’s diary; the prose chaste as the 100 strokes of the hairbrush that mark Melissa’s return from each adventure; and her wide-eyed acceptance that she feeds on the sexual violence she so abhors.
A junior-league Catherine M. bound to raise just as many eyebrows on this side of the Atlantic. One can only imagine where the author’s literary career will take her next.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1781-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
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
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