A brilliant, richly allusive novel from the acclaimed Russian writer (Pushkin House, 1987, etc.), chronicling a search for the soul of a man and his country. Written over the last decade and ending with the 1991 coup, the three tales that comprise this novel present three way stations on the narrator's pilgrimage and reflect the enormous political changes taking place in Russia. A series of encounters in settings lush with spiritual and historical associations enable the protagonist to explore humanity's purpose, its relationship with God and other animals, and the ethical state of Russia. The journey begins, in ``Birds or the Catechesis of Man,'' at Russia's most western point, a spit of land that juts into the Baltic Sea, with the narrator raising queries about the environment and the role of atomic power with a scientist working at a nearby research station where birds are studied. In ``Man in a Landscape,'' set somewhere outside Moscow, he debates with a painter who asserts that ``the world was completely ready when man appeared in it. Man created nothing...didn't create art, either.'' On the shores of the Black Sea, in ``Awaiting Monkeys,'' he meets up again with the scientist and the painter, works as a literary critic, acts in a movie, and then, moving back and forth between Moscow and the Black Sea shore during the Gorbachev years, on the day of the coup experiences a consoling epiphany: an army of angels in the air who ``smelled of the fire of their tireless battle'' for Russia. The title refers to an experiment in ``keeping monkeys in uncongenial climatic zones under almost congenial natural conditions. In other words, free.'' As the narrator ironically observes, ``the monkey is free in Russia, under socialism! We're not free but the monkey is.'' A quintessentially Russian pilgrim's progress, infused with fierce intellectual energy, searing irony, and an anguished love for a long-suffering country and its people.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-10578-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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