A brilliant portrayal of the sufferings of Hungarian Jews during WW II, seen through the raucous and often comic prism of a small boy's stubbornly independent spirit. Jozsef Sondor, six years old in 1938, is living in the rural village of Oszu with his grandfather. Jozsef is separated from his mother and older brother who struggle to survive in Budapest, the family having been abandoned by their father, a successful playwright who will communicate only sporadically with his wife and children throughout the coming war years. Young Jozsef, refreshingly unlike the conventional sensitive protagonist of novels of this kind, is a rude hell-raiser who's often hilariously disrespectful to his elders and instructors. When the danger of invasion forces Jozsef to rejoin his mother and brother, he's ripped away from the comparative calm of village life and thrust into a maelstrom of psychic and moral disturbance that changes him radically as his understanding of what the group will face together increases. Nyiri, who's written one previous novel (Steps, published in 1979 in England), surrounds his young protagonist with dozens of vividly drawn, importantly involved secondary characters and patiently, movingly shows how ritual mistreatment of Jews, exacerbated by the war's unfolding horrors, initially affects Jozsef's childish pastimes (his ``playgrounds''), then slowly assumes fuller form in his consciousness and shapes his embattled growth. This wonderfully detailed novel observes the experience of the Holocaust in numerous fresh, pleasingly oblique ways (e.g., an old woman's plaintive question, ``How will they treat cats that have belonged to Jews?''). A novel with the feel of one that's been thought about and worked on for much of a lifetime. It's a wonder not to be missed.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-10918-4
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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