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. There's laughter in this playful novel as a reward for readers willing to put up with long stretches of the inner life of a German Philistine in an intellectual's clothing.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. He is also very good on dogs, of which his author has three. Kempowski is at his wittiest when spoofing the whole literary endeavor, including public readings at bookstores and the politics of prize-granting committees. Meanwhile, he is supposed to be writing a novel about a man in the depth of winter writing about a man in the heat of summer. His paradise is besieged when another of his romp-mates, a retarded girl from a poor family in the neighborhood, is murdered. He does little more than fondle their ear lobes, but he feels like a caliph, while being treated like a vassal. He collects around him two teen- age sisters as household help, two visiting young nieces, and two neighbor girls.
All this is played out during the hot July/August days while Sovtschick's wife is on vacation in France. Among them: the rebukes he suffers as a conservative author for not writing something of contemporary relevance, and the sexual attractiveness of young women-or, rather, girls, since he seems to have a Lolita complex.
Much has to be waded through before the comic payoffs, chiefly his self-aggrandizing (when not self-pitying) interior monologues that circle around again and again to the same subjects. Successful novelist Alexander Sovtschick, a 60-year-old literary princeling in his northern German spread, complete with swimming pool and a 72-foot stretch of bookshelves, can be extremely funny-and tiresome. Popular German novelist Kempowski etches a comic portrait- partly self-portrait?-of an author as aging narcissist living the good life in a disagreeable world.
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