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. "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. The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Ī violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. 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.
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. Vivid writing here and there, but Josie is a dull character, and the story is a real downer.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.
Yet it wallows in self-pity and indignation, even in the climactic pages, where Josie believes she knows Meredith’s real secret, returns to that motel and acknowledges the truth about Michael, which she has unsuccessfully repressed: “He loved me, but he hated himself more.”
But the changing relationship of Meredith and Josie is central, and the story almost catches fire as Fitch peels away successive layers of pretense to reveal each woman’s hidden story (Meredith’s history of losing other loved ones before Michael, Josie’s uncomfortable memories of her white-trash family and sexually threatening older brother). This backward-and-forward momentum at least varies Fitch’s numbing concentration on Josie’s emotional outrage, as does a subplot involving an independent movie in production (whose cluelessly smug director envisions it as “Bergman meets Hitchcock in Antonioni’s unmade bed”), a preening sex machine who calls himself Nick Nitro and a handsome young actor who worms his way into Josie’s bed without ever eliciting a response from her. As she did in her Oprah-selected White Oleander (1999), Fitch structures this as a contest between two determined women: embittered Josie (who’s intent on learning why her rapturous life with Michael, a struggling artist, wasn’t enough for him), and Michael’s mother, Meredith Loewy, a celebrated concert pianist and smothering matriarch whose attitude toward Josie vacillates between homicidal resentment and almost sisterly empathy. Josie Tyrell is a 20-year-old artist’s model, sometime-actress and substance-abuser whose already chaotic life in L.A.’s underground artistic environs is further unsettled when she’s notified that her boyfriend, Michael Faraday, has killed himself in a rundown motel. Bereavement, alienation and survivor’s anger are the legacy bequeathed to the stunned protagonist of Californian Fitch’s somber second novel.