From first novelist Meer, an uneven whirl with India's brat pack as they try to find themselves—sexually and culturally—in the bright lights of big cities like Bombay, Paris, and New York. Young American-born Sabah's search in India for identity, heritage, and just maybe a husband provides Meer with a loose framework for highlighting the cultural dissonance experienced by today's ``Indibrats.'' Like their European counterparts, they are poor little rich kids seeking sensation and sexual adventure in discos, gay bars, and updated versions of traditional stag evenings with ``nautch'' dancers—in which the nautch girls are boys. Sabah, the daughter of affluent immigrants, has grown up more American than Indian, though her parents have maintained close ties with fellow immigrants and with their family back home. Her best friend, Rani, returned to India when her mother divorced her American father. As Sabah, now a college graduate, leaves America and sometime lover Rob, her Uncle Jimmy, a famous Indian film star and singer, sets off from Bombay to join son Adam, who is supposed to be working in a Paris bank. Once in India, Sabah meets up again with Rani, a successful model but unhappy wife, only to lose her in a bizarre accident. She also socializes with jaded Indibrats and stays with a beloved grandma who serves good food and equally good advice. Uncle Jimmy and his son are not so fortunate: Sexually confused Adam flees his father and follows lover Marc to New York; Uncle Jimmy suffers a heart attack. The cousins' parallel journeys finally intersect—too neatly—in New York as Sabah, who has come home even more confused about herself, accidentally meets Adam, seriously injured while carousing with friends. A former journalist, Meer has an eye for detail and setting, but her characters and their lives are thin constructs—the habituÇs of glossy mags rather than solid novels.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-85242-325-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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