Dunlop’s attempt to combine the tone of Patricia Highsmith with the cast of Sex and the City comes across as rancid, not...
A social-climbing sociopath from Michigan manipulates rich Manhattan relatives—and everyone else—to get what she wants in Dunlop’s second novel (Losing the Light, 2015, etc.).
Laila is a 23-year-old dental hygienist in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, engaged to marry the dentist she works for. Her father died years earlier, and she doesn't know much about his side of the family. When her mother dies, Laila's paternal cousins show up at the funeral, and she's thrilled to discover that they're wealthy New Yorkers—twins Nora and Leo and their older sister, Liberty. Two years later, divorced from her husband, she moves to New York. She's found a stash of letters to her mother from her paternal grandfather that implies an affair between them, which might explain Laila’s parents’ banishment to the hinterlands before her birth. Now Laila wants to reconnect with her family, and family money. Slightly dim Nora invites her to stay in her Tribeca penthouse. Laila is happy to be Nora’s “Pygmalion-like project,” complete with a new wardrobe from Bergdorf Goodman. Former model Liberty, more serious and intellectual and less social than her siblings, finds Laila an internship at the prominent literary agency where she works. Knowing she’s beautiful, Laila makes the most of it. She dumps the famous novelist who falls madly in love with her and heads to Mustique with a ruthless British billionaire who sends her packing when she gets drunk with some hippie strangers. Meanwhile she has a series of tawdry sexual encounters with Cameron, Liberty's best friend's brother, who is also carrying on a very proper courtship with Liberty, encounters that don’t end after Laila moves in with real estate mogul’s son Blake Katz (a too-obvious take on Jared Kushner). For a self-described “skilled chameleon,” Laila makes a lot of self-destructive decisions.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5598-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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BOOK REVIEW
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