With just the right blend of empathy and intelligence, Desai (Baumgartner's Bombay, 1989) explores the West's long fascination with Indian spirituality via the story of a European couple who, like so many in the '70s, sought enlightenment in the subcontinent. When Sophie visits her ailing husband, Matteo, in an Indian hospital and begs him to return to Italy to be with her and their two children, Matteo refuses. ``You will leave, Sophie, but not I,'' he tells her. By this time they've been in India for several years, it's the mid-80s, and Sophie now understands that their children no longer matter to him: ``They were what we had left behind.'' Desai's narrative moves from continent to continent and back and forth in time, following the couple up to this impasse and beyond. In many ways, the story is also a brief, for Desai is assembling a case for understanding why people like Matteo, a child of European privilege and the 1960s, chose to go on pilgrimage, to ``journey to Ithaca.'' His unhappy childhood, and his own children's unease with their conventional grandparents, suggest some reasons for his desperate search for spiritual peace. Skeptical Sophie, on the other hand, goes to India simply because she loves her husband and thinks ``the possibilities...endless and fascinating.'' After a few years, however, the squalor they live in, the drug-crazed hippies they meet, the charlatans they're gulled byalong with Matteo's increasing estrangement from her, and his ever-greater attachment to ``Mother,'' a charismatic guruall send Sophie on a journey of her own. Determined to prove the Mother a fraud, she travels to Egypt, Europe, and the US, returning to India only to find the truth more troubling and complex than she imagined. Still, Sophie must keep traveling: the Mother is now dead, and Matteo has disappeared.... A splendidly nuanced evocation, never credulous or dismissive of those impelled to go on pilgrimage: Pilgrim's Progress updated and uprooted, but still as compelling.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43900-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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