And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses.
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. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. 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. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. 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.
An interesting and original bit of creative writing- a tour de force, perhaps, but provocative.įour 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. Through Caesar himself, who proves more the thinker than the doer, through his wife, with her doubtful loyalties, through Cledia and her brother, the poet Catullus, Brutus and his mother, Mare Anthony, Cleopatra, an aunt of Caesar's (perhaps the liveliest figure of them all), through reers and spies and hangers on, the reader sees the various facets of life, suspicion, conspiracy, worship, love, hate, attitudes, points of view, philosophy, comments on art and literature, on social changes- the whole blending into a rich tapestry. Wilder a gift for evoking the classic past- and in this he makes one almost believe that he has unearthed documentary records - letters, extracts from diaries, communications to bring into current immediacy those months before the assassination of Julius Ca One follows the social pattern of life in Rome,- the entertainments, the intricate of jealousies, the personalities that held sway. The choice of this new novel as Book-of-the- Month reserve, may again widen that market to include more general readers.
The author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey commands a definite and fairly predictable market among the intellectuals.
0 kommentar(er)
