Summary: Moving to New York to pursue creative ambitions, four former classmates share decades marked by love, loss, addiction and haunting elements from a brutal childhood. By the author of The People in the Trees. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
This long, claustrophobically written novel by the author of The People in the Trees (2013) follows the lives of four college men (and their many friends, nearly all male) from their early postgraduation days in New York through much of their accomplished adult lives, and backward to their childhoods. It opens with them helping Willem and the fragile Jude St. Francis move into an apartment on Lispenard Street and then delineates the course of their lives. They include Malcolm, a light-skinned African American architect from a wealthy background; JB, an occasional drug-using artist of Haitian ancestry (the author does a great job of describing his art—no easy task); Willem, the handsome actor who, as we first meet him, is, of course, waiting tables downtown; and, at center stage, Jude. Although Jude is a successful litigator, his full background is murky, though what we do learn about it is horrific. Jude is frail, vulnerable, private, and given to cutting himself. In his neediness, he is the focus of the others' existence. This profoundly disturbing book is about pain and compulsion, secrets and betrayals, sexuality and loss—but, finally, about friendship. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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