A voice we thought we'd never hear again speaks out with plangency and clarity in this unfinished novel, found in the wreckage of the car in which its Nobel Prize—winning author perished in 1960. As we learn in an Editor's Note contributed by Catherine Camus, her father's first-draft manuscript was withheld from publication following his death for fear that its inchoate state would be savaged by Camus's literary enemies and rivals, notably Jean-Paul Sartre. Perhaps; but it's hard to believe any reader could have been blind to the work's distinctive merits: vivid impressionistic descriptions of its autobiographical protagonist's childhood and youth in Algeria; a deeply empathetic portrayal of young Jacques Cormery's "ravenous appetite for life...[and] untamed and hungry intellect"; and incisive characterizations of such beloved family members as Jacques's steely paternal grandmother, volatile Uncle Ernest, and beautiful, illiterate, sorrowful mother, grieving all her life—as will Jacques himself—for her young husband, who died at the Marne in WW I. In the most moving sequence, Camus describes Jacques's surprised empowerment by a dedicated teacher, M. Bernard, who fought in that war and acknowledges his special responsibility to students who lost their fathers to it ("I try at least here to take the place of my dead comrades"). Of course, the whole is frustratingly fragmented, unpolished; long unbroken paragraphs dominate, inconsistencies in detail crop up often, and Camus's notes and preliminary sketches are lumped both into footnotes and an extended Appendix. Still, the very incompleteness of the work validates its power: In one heart-stopping sentence, Jacques's mother is identified as "Widow Camus." All honor to Catherine Camus for offering us this invaluable glimpse into the life and art of a writer who may have been greater than we knew then or can know even now.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 978-0-679-43937-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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