The young author’s prose displays a reckless energy and clever turns of phrase that bode well for future work, but this...
The 20-year-old Jong-Fast (daughter of Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast) makes her literary debut with more style than substance in this slim novel about the travails of a privileged, seriously addicted young woman making the scene in New York’s kiddy society.
Convinced she murdered her boyfriend with an air-bubble in his syringe, Miranda Woke, a tediously decadent 19-year-old who’s been mentioned 16 times on the New York Post’s gossipy “Page Six,” arrives at his funeral with claws bared. She casts a jaundiced eye at the well-heeled mourners on their cell phones, describes their reprehensible and scandalous habits in great detail, and keenly observes their sagging and surgically enhanced flesh clothed in the latest name-brands. Her friend Janice retires to the bathroom to fix heroin; Miranda joins her to snort some cocaine; and so it goes. She has famous, much-married parents who don’t love her, and she in turn doesn’t love anybody, especially not the one person in her life who seems to care at all: ex-boyfriend Brett. Brett is a “Five Towns Jew” who was born to be a podiatrist but instead covers mattresses with frosting and calls himself an artist. Miranda, however, has only one goal: to stay high and in denial (though she does have a typical trust-fund job in an art gallery), and, toward that end, she ingests gallons of vodka, along with a laundry list of illegal substances and prescribed psychotropic drugs that make their way to her from places ranging from tony Greenwich, Connecticut, to the sidewalks of Soho. Will this girl come to her senses in time to save herself? And just how much of Miranda Woke is Jong-Fast? Unfortunately, the second question is more interesting than the first.
The young author’s prose displays a reckless energy and clever turns of phrase that bode well for future work, but this first attempt is cartoonish, derivative, and immeasurably too familiar.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50281-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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