Mostly frosting, not nearly enough cake.
Inflamed artistic temperaments and miscellaneous relationship issues preoccupy two generations of immediate and extended families—in a crowded debut by Esquire’s literary editor.
Somewhat contentedly married Merit Ash stoically endures her Mr. Fixit husband Wyatt’s finicky perfectionism, while performing her tasks for local regional magazine Ohio Is without tumbling too quickly into bed with sexy slacker co-worker Randy. Nor does Merit lack other baggage, most of it inherited from her father, Lowell Haven, a flamboyant artist best known for his absurdly egocentric “self-portraits” (Lowell as the Wife of Bath and other Canterbury Pilgrims, Lowell Crucified with Cow Crucified Next to Him, etc.), and mother Jenny, herself a painter, long divorced from Lowell, whose imagined grisly deaths dominate many of her canvasses. We learn their histories through omniscient narration of Merit’s increasingly distracted misadventures; excerpts from Jenny’s diary detailing her flight to London in the 1970s, “work” as a woefully unqualified au pair for a bisexual rich twit’s family, and fateful meeting with dashing young Lowell; and the très gai effusions of real estate heir Fergus Goodwyn, who was Jenny’s high school confidant, and now lives with his lover Lowell (and other spongers) at On Ne Peut Pas Vivre Seul, a 65-room mansion smack in the middle of the Ohio heartland, that’s a cross between Fawlty Towers and Michael Jackson’s Neverland. The story’s actions (so to speak) are focused toward a lavish climactic party, at which it seems perfectly reasonable when the Ashes’ preadolescent daughter Caroline arrives costumed as Caligula, and no big deal when Jenny reveals what’s meant to be a bombshell but in fact strikes us as simply further calculated eccentricity. It’s all funny for a while, but eventually the reader feels as if trapped at an endless cocktail party, pinned in a corner with Truman Capote, Nancy Mitford and Alec Guinness as Gully Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth.
Mostly frosting, not nearly enough cake.Pub Date: May 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-12512-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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