An angry, once-abused woman painter almost disintegrates, then experiences a last-minute healing in an equally abused placemid- 70s Haiti: the emotional, scattershot newest from Trinidadian-born Guy (My Love, My Love, or the Peasant Girl, 1985, etc.) Jonnie Dash, a beautiful African-American artist, having sold a painting for a half-million dollars (an interesting but never explained event) goes to Haiti to see her old lover and Pygmalion, GÇrard. GÇrard was married when she first met him years before in an interracial salon in New York; now that he's widowed and available, though, Jonnie is no longer sure she loves him. Troubled by painful memories and disturbing blackouts, she flees to her favorite hotel in Haiti. Like one of those generic airport, airplane, and ship settings, this ``old Hotel'' is frequented by a range of characters whom Jonnie seduces, befriends, attacks, and fears. It's the Watergate era, which gives Jonnie a chance not only to pontificate on the infamy of the US and obnoxious Americans abroad, but on Haitian and African history as well. She also recalls her life as an orphan, her rape by a Catholic priest, life on New York streets, the drawings of sexual organs that made her famous, a failed marriage, and a son shot and killed by the police as he ran away from a bungled burglary. Amid all this are encounters with sinister Haitians and arrogant whites; raunchy sex with Stephan, toy-boy of wealthy friend Jessica; pursuit by a nasty foreign service officer who uses the notorious Tonton Macoute to help him find Lucknair, the small boy he's in love with; puzzling deaths; and the improbable rescue of Lucknair that, together with Jonnie's affair with a black revolutionary, will apparently save her. Somewhere within this clutter of melodramatic action and attitude there lurks an interesting heroine with an interesting story to tell, but, sadly, she's not easy to find.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-24780-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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
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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