Southern writer and first-timer Parker combines a lyrical style with a fully articulated social world—in a tale of love and betrayal, ambivalence and desire, and guilt and addiction. Set in small-town 1950's North Carolina, this sordid melodrama transcends its pulpy roots in period novels of drug addiction. Edwin Keane's charmed life falls apart one night when he drives his car off a back road, killing his fiancÇe. Son of the town's bigwig, this ``handsome, healthy college kid'' descends into a nether world of morphine use, ostensibly for his injured back. Protected in ``narcotic complacency'' by his family and friends, Edwin moves into a cabin owned by his parents and harasses the local pharmacy to increase his dosages. But the assistant pharmacist, moved partly by class resentment and partly by a desire ``to save'' Edwin, refuses to indulge his pain and self-pity. Obsessed by his vision of the accident, Edwin is finally stirred by a new sight: a beautiful girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Despite her white-trash origins, Eureka Speight is no ordinary teenager, but a bright and dreamy angel of ``ethereal fleetness''—and better than morphine in Edwin's view. With the help of Eureka and the pharmacist, Edwin kicks the habit in a Kentucky clinic, only to return back home where all his problems resurface—not just his memory but his oppressive mother, his indifferent father, and all the responsibilities of his class. The pharmacist and Eureka's father conspire to return the young woman to her rightful place at home, and enlist her brother Randall, a loquacious and incorrigible Huck figure whose innocence is exploited to this end. There's much texture to this haunting tale of sin and redemption, of sacrifice and punishment, making it more than a story of star-crossed lovers. Much like the hothouse Faulkner of Sanctuary, with the same bitter humor and nihilistic denouement.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-684-19424-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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