If James Joyce had got his start as a Belfast Protestant with more of an interest in politics and less of a sense of humor—but with all of his scatological obsessions intact—he might have given us something close to McKinty's grim debut novel. The gritty realism that seems to be the fashion in Britain and Ireland these days has cast a long shadow over the younger generation of writers, many of whom apparently feel compelled to mimic the obsessions of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, just as young Americans have aped the simplicities of Hemingway for the last 50 years. McKinty's version of the new realism involves a walking tour of the uglier stretches of Belfast and New York, narrated from the points of view of a hunchbacked teenager and a terrorist who is very likely her father. The young girl, who lives in a Protestant neighborhood of Belfast, attempts to carry on a normal high school routine of sports, classes, and amateur theatrical productions despite the obsessive interest of a perverted biology teacher who persuades her to photograph and describe her bowel movements for him. Her father, meanwhile, a paramilitary hit man who has fled the country to avoid arrest, finds himself stuck in a Manhattan mental institution. Whether this is a mistake, a ruse to avoid deportation, or simply his natural habitat is not made much clearer than the rest of the story, which has little semblance of plot and proceeds along an uneven line from murkiness to utter incomprehensibility. To some extent, the lack of a clear storyline is part of the story in its own right, seemingly meant to express the aimlessness and deracination of the Protestant Loyalists of Ulster: ``Orphans of history with only their mad religion to give them any identity at all.'' But it also has the effect of keeping readers outside that hermetic world rather than bringing them into it. Rambling, incoherent, and gratuitously squalid.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14432-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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