A novel with a number of interesting parts that don’t quite come together.
In her debut novel, Szilágyi tells a story about loss, the human cost of governmental repression, and the painful possibilities of growing up, all with overtones of fantastical detail.
Pluta is 14 years old and on her own in Brooklyn in 1980 after running away from boarding school. She is an odd, sullenly determined girl who seems to at first fall into a lucky fantasy of New York runaway life. She immediately meets an eccentric young man who takes her out to dinner, accompanies her to a tattoo parlor so she can get wings tattooed on her back, and welcomes her into his shabby Gowanus apartment without any malicious intentions. Unfortunately, Pluta’s new independence quickly runs into the darker side of city life, and she plunges into a predictable decline, sleeping in parks and turning to prostitution to survive. This bleak coming-of-age story alternates with glimpses of Pluta’s life just two years earlier, when she lived in Buenos Aires with her mother and beloved, professorial father. When Pluta’s father is disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War, her mother, battered by grief and fear, decides to flee to America and install Pluta in a fancy boarding school. These South American chapters have a vivid emotional earnestness that fits awkwardly with Pluta’s struggles in New York, which suffer from a chilly numbness. When terrible or difficult things happen to Pluta, Szilágyi explains how she feels but does not give the reader the opportunity to feel it. Without the driving force of clear emotions and motivations, Pluta’s choices seem slightly baffling, and the various threads of story drift into disparate parts. The novel’s fantastical elements feel like picturesque trappings, never quite woven into the plot or the emotional heft of the story in a way that makes sense.
A novel with a number of interesting parts that don’t quite come together.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941360-11-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Lanternfish Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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