Cool but, as always, deadly accurate.
Brookner (Making Things Better, Jan. 2003, etc.) again chronicles with surgical precision lives distorted by temperament and circumstance.
Elizabeth, now in her 50s, narrates a grim tale about two women, friends since childhood, whose illusions about love have tragic outcomes. Elizabeth and Betsy are quintessential Brookner characters who realize early on that life cannot be fought but only endured. Both are affected by a past that shapes the rest of their lives. Betsy’s mother died young, leaving her to be raised by her father and a maiden aunt. She yearned to belong to a “real” family like Elizabeth’s, which was in reality riven by discord and, eventually, divorce. After school, Elizabeth studies cooking in Paris, where she is miserable and lonely. Back in London, no happier and now bored as well, she marries the much older Digby. Betsy comes home from Paris, where she is living with French radical Daniel, to attend the wedding. Elizabeth observes that her friend is happy and in love, a condition that suits Betsy’s romantic nature. Though both women come of age in the 1960s, neither is able to enjoy that decade’s freedom or opportunities Still bored, Elizabeth next falls into bed with Edmund Fairlie, a colleague of her husband’s; she finds their affair curiously stimulating, but when Digby suddenly dies she breaks it off and retreats into quiet loneliness. Betsy, alone after Daniel is killed in an accident, meets Edmund at Digby’s funeral and is soon in love with him and his entire family. Elizabeth observes at a distance her friend’s doomed liaison with the cool and ruthless Edmund, whose wife is equally cynical. Then Betsy becomes terminally ill, and Elizabeth realizes that both of them are now middle-aged, childless, and alone. Their mistake was to see themselves as lovers rather than as wives, and both have paid for that error with lonely and empty years.
Cool but, as always, deadly accurate.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6165-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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