In characteristic hushed, mannered, pallid style, Adams (Superior Women, 1984, etc.) now takes on the hopes, fears, losses, and (illusory) gains of six affluent old ("very, very old") friends entering the "false spring" of early advanced age in a comfortable, featureless, falsely vernal California enclave called San Sebastian. Of the six, Dudley, a journalist, and Edward, a gay poet who stopped producing poems 15 years ago, have known each other longest: grew up in Boston and met before each met the love of a lifetime, whom both now fear will leave them—Dudley because husband Sam has lost the power to palm and is growing restless, as in the old days; Edward because his younger (50) lover Freddie has newly become a gay-rights activist and is making loads of handsome acquaintances in San Francisco marches. Celeste, the recent widow of handsome, powerful ex-reporter Charles, fears loneliness and disease; and her friends fear for her, because site has token up with a young (50) Charles-lookalike named Bill, whom no one has met but of whom everyone is suspicious. Polly, a lover of Charles' before Celeste met him in the 50's, has taken to secreting hoards of cash and delivering them by night to poor Mexican families on the outskirts of San Sebastian, and now she's taken one of the Mexicans, a young (50) mechanic, as her lover, meanwhile, she fears a recurrence of cancer. Into this wan drama enters pale Sara, young (40) niece of Celeste, whose mother has died and whose lifetime causes (pacifism, rights of the poor) have lost luster, and so who involves herself in the old folks' problems, mostly to good effect (though Sam dies and Freddy does leave Edward); later, she finds the love of her lifetime in the form of an ex-college boyfriend, and settles into a period all the San Sebastian crowd look back on nostalgically: yes, middle age. Artsy, cluttered with digressions and mannered speech, but still hinting at the tragic ironies involved in reflecting on and trying to look forward to lives already spent.
Pub Date: April 12, 1988
ISBN: 0671028499
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
PERSPECTIVES
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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