Lively, pitch-perfect and assured. Readers will be wanting to hear more from this writer.
Personal tragedy meets the tragedy of our time in Roe’s winning debut novel.
A girl falls down a well, captures national attention and is saved. A boy survives a tsunami. What happens to such people? Roe builds to a mournful answer: They make lists. They live, and then, like but not like the rest of us, they die. In the case of young Anabelle Vincent, death was part of the bargain from the moment she slipped into a coma—and into the international spotlight. Just as every unhappy family is different in its unhappiness, per Tolstoy, so Anabelle’s is always on the verge of implosion: “You leave a family once,” writes Roe, wisely. “But then you leave them every day after that, too.” Mom, who’s “always felt an allegiance to the place where she’s from, even if there isn’t much there,” may share Dad’s desperation, but there’s nothing like a crisis to bring people together. And as for Anabelle, well, she’s always been an enigma, and now, unconscious, even more so. What’s happening behind those closed eyes? The world conjectures, and waits, the event of Anabelle’s slipping into a different reality providing the excuse for all kinds of questers—women whose daughters are lying ill with cancer, fathers with children fighting overseas—and for all kinds of cads and quacks. Roe’s story, with its careful unfolding, looks behind the psychology of the “victim soul” to examine why it is that needful people crave miracles in the first place; it’s an old question, and writers as diverse as Chaucer and Flannery O’Connor have had their go at it, putting him in good company. But though an old question, Roe’s story feels just right for our desperate and despairing time, when a miracle—any miracle—will do, and when Anabelle may have been better off, after all, not to know what was going on on this side of the curtain.
Lively, pitch-perfect and assured. Readers will be wanting to hear more from this writer.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61620-360-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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