A young Indian intellectual’s disillusioning experience of the —romantic— ideas that lure Westerners to the East (and vice versa) is plaintively traced in this well-wrought first novel, a compact bildungsroman graced by ironic echoes of Forster and Flaubert. Samar, a Brahmin college student who acknowledges that he has little life outside the books he compulsively reads, encounters in the city of Benares several acquaintances who, in their separate ways, begin coaxing him out of his shell. Diana West (a symbolic name, n’est ce-pas?), a moneyed Englishwoman in love with India, introduces Samar to her internationally mixed circle of friends—notably, beautiful Frenchwoman Catherine and her lover Anand, a competent (if unexceptional) sitar player. A brief trip into the mountains (inviting comparison with the Marabar Caves incident in A Passage to India) throws the inexperienced Samar and the worldly Catherine together, resulting in the loss of his innocence and of her self-confidence and devotion to Anand. Simultaneously, Samar’s cautious friendship with Ranesh, an enigmatic loner with vaguely political affiliations and perhaps ambitions, introduces him to student demonstrations and overt violence, paradoxically deepening his wish to retreat into —a simplified life and world——embodied in the quickly glimpsed figure of a farm boy tending a herd of cattle. In the novel’s muted second half, Samar is called back home by his father’s illness, wills himself to forget Catherine and the seductive allure of Benares, and begins a career as a schoolteacher—all in a long falling away from the dangers—and rewards—of a life of active involvement with other people’s enticing, intimidating imperfections. Samar’s careful withdrawal from the messes that Catherine, Ranesh, and others have made of their lives is explicitly shown to be a result both of wisdom and of cowardice. A work of admirable subtlety and high intelligence, with an unfortunately low emotional temperature. It analyzes its promising content brilliantly while dramatizing it only imperfectly.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50274-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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
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
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