Brookner’s 18th novel (Visitors, 1998. etc.) offers moving variations on the animating theme of all her fiction: the origins, nature, and consequences of human isolation. This time, the theme is played out in the lives of two bright but troubled sisters, Miriam and Beatrice. Brookner’s narrative deftly shuttles back and forth over several decades, tracing the sisters” conflicted yearnings for love and independence. Beatrice, a talented but uninspired pianist, eventually gives up performing—a decision driven equally by stiffening fingers and her disappointment that practicing her art hasn—t brought her anyone to love. Miriam, otherwise so lucid, has an affair with a charming, heartless married man, deluding herself into believing that her trysts will meet with a happy outcome. Few contemporary writers are as fascinated as Brookner by the complex relations of siblings, and none can match her vigor or originality in excavating family histories. The faded gentility of Miriam and Beatrice’s family life, and the unquestioned assumption of their parents that a woman can be fulfilled only by marriage (an assumption the sisters both resist and embrace), are artfully conveyed. The ways in which the sisters both need and rebuff each other are also explored with economy and precision. Brookner finds a perfect symbol of the relationship in Miriam’s sudden marriage to a bland scientist: the marriage both allows her to distance herself from her increasingly dependent sister, and permits her to maintain her special ties to Beatrice. Those ties are eventually severed by death, and the story’s last third rather rigorously traces Miriam’s efforts to come to grips with the inescapable loneliness of her existence. Her struggles, waged in the anonymity of London’s austere thoroughfares and neighborhoods, are moving, and her eventual embrace of solitude as an essential part of the human condition is both disturbing and convincing. Brookner owns such terrain. Those familiar with her work will find this a particularly spare and sharp variation. Those unfamiliar with it may find the book excessively bleak and somewhat deterministic.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50189-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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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