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. I’d thought about that for a long time.” Also nuanced is the uncomfortable relationship between aunt and niece, in which both withhold more than they give.Īmusing but also smart about people and unexpectedly sweet.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. Julia’s longing is revealed in moments like this, watching a friend with her boyfriend: “he put his hand on her chest, kind of fit his fingers above her collarbone as if it was a ridge on a rock face and he was going to climb her. A contributor to the New Yorker's “Shouts and Murmurs” humor column, Rathbone ( The Patterns of Paper Monsters, 2010) reliably wrings the humor out of this situation, but more impressively, she manages to evoke its poignancy. Terrifyingly, Viv turns out to be a virgin, too, and the dull small town she lives in looks like part of the problem. So she ends up spending the summer with her dowager Aunt Vivienne in North Carolina. suburb where she’s moved after college, but she can’t go home because her parents have rented out their house and gone to Costa Rica. Since she hates her job, there’s nothing to keep her in the D.C. Something that badly needs to be turned inside out, banged right.” Her obsession with this issue is magnified by the fact that she’s lost the focus once provided by her nearly-but-not-quite Olympic swimming career. Like something pickling in its own juices. Like a flower suffocating in its own air. Will someone help this poor young woman with her virginity?ĭespite being reasonably attractive and chalking up a few near misses, Julia Greenfield has reached the age of 26 without having sex.
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