A rather depressing glimpse of things to come, culled from the rising talents of some 20 writing programs nationwide by Hoffman (Practical Magic, 1995, etc.), who blithely and somewhat terrifyingly informs us that ``what's in these pages is only the start.'' All the standard criticisms of writing-program prose—its flatness, dullness, lack of depth—are well-illustrated by the selections found here. Almost all are narrated by or from the point of view of people who are young and confused at the start and who make very little progress by the end of pieces that are, in fact, mostly portraits rather than stories. The young WASP of Lindsay Fleming's ``The Slipper'' manages to lose his father, get married, disgrace himself, and go crazy all without the least intimation of drama: His decline comes about as naturally as the winding-down of a cocktail party. In Denise Simard's ``Tallulah at Your Feet,'' a badly stalled college grad walks dogs for a living and dates a boring lout for no good reason other than loneliness and sloth; the pathetic crush she develops on a married man, offered as the climax, is described triumphantly though it seems merely desperate. The best entries tend to be the ``culture narratives''—e.g., Caroline Cheng's ``Consolation'' or Julie Rold's ``Bloodlines''- -which describe and take place within a cohesive and well-defined social milieu, the Philippines, say, or the German communities of the Midwest, more successful mainly because they're the more likely to rely upon narration, description, and plot for effect. Most of the others—like Adam Schroeder's ``The Distance Between Prague and New Orleans'' (a narcissistic actor fakes an epiphany in a cemetery)—seem to be engaging in various forms of self-absorption or self-analysis that may be good for the authors' souls but does little for their writing. Dreadfully dull and unbearably pompous. If really a foretaste of literary trends, to be read while weeping.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83314-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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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