A portrait of a loving, brotherly relationship served in an inventive narrative device that explores the bonds of family,...
In Kirby’s debut novel, two brothers in their 60s unexpectedly become the executors of a $50 million estate, with instructions to disperse funds as they see fit among the citizens and institutions of their childhood hometown.
Brothers Joe and Darren are piqued when a lawyer sets them up on a conference call and tells them that a seemingly impoverished neighbor from their hometown has died and included the brothers in his sizable estate. When Joe and Darren fly to Glenville, Indiana, to hear the details, they discover that while no money is being given to them directly, they are now responsible for choosing how to give away the $50 million to Glenville’s inhabitants and businesses. As Joe and Darren begin to explore how Glenville has changed since their boyhood days, they find many people have died, moved away, or grown into entirely different, more mature versions of themselves. The book adopts a vignette-style narrative, where each chapter is anchored by the exploration of a new person’s life story, with asides about Joe’s and Darren’s relationship and experiences helping to flesh out and sustain the narrative. After speaking with a young waitress about how difficult it is for young people to find work in present-day Glenville, Joe reminiscences about a relatively cushy adolescent summer job helping weigh trucks—though very little truck-weighing, and a vast amount of basketball with neighboring children, took place. Like a Midwestern version of The Canterbury Tales, the book is rich in anecdotes from midcentury Middle America, but it lacks a compelling throughline. While the plot does deliver on its eventual promise, the chapters’ drawn-out pacing tends to drain away any urgency. The prose is rather dry: “The next morning Joe and I had a meeting set up with many of the church leaders in town to talk about their various community outreach programs. Again, John Bourke had helped us with tracking down the right contacts and paving the way for a meeting. We really didn’t know how to handle this category of service provider.” Nevertheless, the relationship between Joe and Darren is deeply felt and genuinely emotionally resonant.
A portrait of a loving, brotherly relationship served in an inventive narrative device that explores the bonds of family, responsibility and the changing nature of time.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1634130042
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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