Achingly beautiful and filled with heart-wrenchingly real characters: one of Hoffman’s best.
A Yale senior loses his way on Long Island, and three generations suffer the consequences in this haunting latest from Hoffman (The Ice Queen, 2005, etc.).
Convinced that he’s the true love she promised herself as her father lay dying, orphaned 17-year-old Arlie Singer seduces John Moody moments after he stops to ask for directions. Stunned by his recklessness, the normally cautious and tidy John hightails it back to college. But Arlie will not be denied, so they are married too young, have baby Sam too soon and, after John’s parents move to Florida, are trapped full-time in the Glass Slipper, an all-windows house designed by his father, a famous architect. John ignores his own brilliant, odd son and hardly ever comes home from work. Arlie, realizing she’s made a terrible mistake, falls in love with George Snow, who washes the Glass Slipper’s windows. She won’t leave Sam, even after she has George’s baby—John, typically, seems oblivious—but she’s stricken with breast cancer and dead at 25. Sam grows up angry and bereft; at 16, he has a full-fledged drug habit, and even his devoted ten-year-old sister Blanca can’t keep him in the house he hates with the father he loathes. Hoffman spins a grim fairy tale, complete with an unsympathetic stepmother (Cynthia, who was sleeping with John before Arlie died) and a strange nanny (Meredith, who follows John to Connecticut because she’s the only one besides him who sees Arlie’s ghost hovering around). But while unsparingly depicting the awful damage unhappy people inflict on each other, the author refuses to provide villains; even clueless, thoughtless John is at heart terrified and remorseful. His final actions suggest that it’s never too late to see the truth, and that terrible mistakes can sometimes be at least partially atoned for—but this is a very sad story. Nonetheless, the ending offers hope for Blanca and a surprising posthumous redemption for desperate, doomed Sam.
Achingly beautiful and filled with heart-wrenchingly real characters: one of Hoffman’s best.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-05878-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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