A harrowingly beautiful exploration of unrequited love and the fallout of single-minded devotion.
In three different incarnations, Eve is given the chance to “get it right” in a familiar struggle between vocation, marriage, and motherhood.
Eve is a devoted mother, a wife, and a painter. Or rather, she’s all three but can only be fully devoted to one at a time. In this three-part novel, we experience three possible paths for Eve; Rosewood weighs each version like a chemist, precisely and intentionally changing the size of three variables in Eve's life: her son, Blue; her husband, Liam; and her best friend, Pari, the sole subject of Eve's portraits. As a mother, Eve is negligent and intellectually unfulfilled. When her son accidentally drowns, she is completely subsumed by his phantom, losing her husband in the process. As an artist, Eve is a portrait of hesitation, unable to act on her desires for anything beyond her work. In the last section, the only one where Eve and Liam’s relationship has any longevity, we know it is at the cost of motherhood and vocation. Across these alternate realities, Rosewood explores the cost of love, the notion that complete devotion to any one thing creates an unfulfilled life. Using visual art and the artistic vocation as a metaphor for writing is a familiar trope; where Rosewood stands out is in her unromantic meditation on the grotesque in beauty. The three parts of the novel act as reincarnations: three opportunities for characters to grow and reform themselves. Anything that remains static here is not immortal but corpselike. Pari's beauty, obsessively recorded in each of Eve's paintings, becomes like the sculpture Eve makes of her dead son—creepy. While the novel sometimes feels overly self-conscious, Rosewood's haunting prose and the moments when the three alternate universes bump up against each other are delightful. Just a shadow exists on the page, but a way to reconcile Eve’s three identities hovers just out of reach, for the reader to create in their own life.
A harrowingly beautiful exploration of unrequited love and the fallout of single-minded devotion.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68283-137-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Texas Tech Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four 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.
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. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. 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. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. 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. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. 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.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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