Here, more than ever, Adams (Listening to Billie, Beautiful Girl) seems to be dressing up women's-magazine fiction as serious literary work—with some style but little real authority. The lady in romantic disarray this time is 40-year-old Daphne, long-divorced and big-breasted and new to San Francisco—where she's come to be custodian/renovator/decorator in her old chum Agatha's just-purchased house in posh Pacific Heights. (Agatha's late father, a shady General, has left her a fortune.) And Daphne is determined to do without men for a while, since she's "addicted to even the most miserable forms of love": past lover Jake was a junkie; recent lover Derek is a pig; only Jean-Paul of Paris, her adulterous love of long ago, was a sweetie (not to mention "the beautiful unforgettable shape of his cock"), but she let him get away—and now he's a "leading Socialist economic theorist." Still, Daphne, who has made "a career out of personal relationships," does let herself get somewhat emotionally involved. She has sexy fantasies about "beautiful" carpenter Tony—who turns out, alas, to be a sometime homosexual prostitute. She meets the Houston family: handsome blond Royce (who'll have an affair with physician Agatha), dark wife Ruth (who'll temporarily go mad), wool-sculptor Caroline (who'll turn lesbian), flaky son Whitey (who'll beat up Caroline and then go off to Alaska to get killed in a fight). And finally Daphne will discover that old flame Jean-Paul is teaching at Berkeley—so there's a Clairol-commercial reunion ("We praised and blessed each other, for everything") with a happy fadeout. . . though J-P may have a terminal disease. What does all this add up to? Very little, despite an attempt to relate Daphne's "emotional temperature-taking" to "the proliferation of violence" in the 1970s (not only the Houston family, but also a possible link between Agatha's money and the murder of Chile's Allende!)—an awkward stab at metaphor even less convincing than the use of Billie Holliday in Listening to Billie. Nor does Daphne's narrative strongly engage on the simplest storytelling level: the supporting cast remains faceless (partly because of Adams' limited-vocabulary obsession with "beautiful" people); there's no tension, despite heavy foreshadowing throughout; and Adams seems never to have decided whether archly self-centered narrator Daphne is a character or just a generalized alter ego. Painless—but the thinnest work yet from an initially alluring, superficially polished, increasingly banal and repetitive writer.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1980
ISBN: 0449146529
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
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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