The novel really isn’t this writer’s métier, and The Doctor’s House is not one of her better books.
A family so dysfunctional that it makes the House of Atreus look like the Brady Bunch gradually reveals its secrets in Beattie’s emotionally charged seventh novel, her first since My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997).
The story’s told by three narrators, beginning with fortysomething Nina, a freelance copy editor, widowed since her beloved husband’s death from injuries sustained in a car crash, still locked in a tense symbiotic relationship with her brother Andrew, a divorced computer programmer and—like their father (the “doctor” of the title) before him—a compulsive philanderer. When Andrew informs Nina that he’s decided to look up an old (female) high school friend, her thoughts range back to various times during their unhappy childhood, and to Andrew’s several failures (which, back then, seemed to be successes) with women. The ill-judged middle section employs the viewpoint of their (unnamed) mother, whose lachrymose recounting of her victimization by her selfish husband, and her subsequent alcoholism grows quickly tedious and is alleviated only by Beattie’s potent disclosure of the woman’s indifference to her shell-shocked children (“Truth be told, they seemed like two other adults who lived in our house”). Finally, we get Andrew’s version, which succeeds much more fully in depicting an irreversibly damaged psyche, while also telling us a good deal more about the sources and the extent of Nina’s wary withdrawal from other people and obsessive fixation on her brother’s love life. Beattie skillfully avoids the cliché every reader will be expecting, and her portrayal of the coldhearted doctor, a genuine monster of appetite and ego, has a hallucinatory intensity. It’s smartly written, as always, and the dialogue can’t be faulted. And yet . . . one balks at the time spent in the company of these relentlessly unhappy people, suspecting that the situation treated here at novel-length virtually begs to be reshaped within the confines of a typical Beattie short story.
The novel really isn’t this writer’s métier, and The Doctor’s House is not one of her better books.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1264-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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