Paperback, 720 pages
English language
Published March 10, 2015 by Doubleday.
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
I don’t often abandon books, but half way through this I realised it was becoming too relentlessly Jude-centric, and in a way that mythologised him more than the character development could bear. The ensemble had faded into a pain narrative. I believe it’s been turned into a stage play, and the reviews for that look interesting…
cw: suicide, self harm[return][return]i cried a lot and it was engrossing. it's long and kept me up late reading.
