After a very successful nonfiction run (Bird by Bird, 1994, etc), Lamott returns with her fifth novel seemingly refreshed and invigorated with a further exploration of the world of Rosie Ferguson, the awkward adolescent tennis champion first seen in Rosie (1983). Safely nestled in suburbia, surrounded by loving adults, and bolstered by her success as half of the top-ranked tennis team in the northern California girls 14-and-under doubles, Rosie lives a life sufficiently all-American to include a haunting sense of impending disaster. This sense of foreboding, shared by just about everyone Rosie knows, is personified in the form of Luther, a shabby, middle-aged loner who hangs around the area's tennis courts watching the young girls compete. Rosie's mother, Elizabeth, a recovered alcoholic, must fight the temptation to pin all her free- floating anxieties on creepy Luther, who's really just a distraction from her own troubling directionlessness and depression. Elizabeth's tendency to spend the day in her darkened bedroom is hurting her marriage and scaring Rosie, who alternately longs to nurse her mother back to health and to strangle her for being so weak. And Rosie has enough worries without this: Her best friend and tennis partner, Simone, has been experimenting with sex while skinny Rosie can hardly justify wearing a training bra; a beloved family friend is dying; and Rosie finds herself curiously drawn to Luther. Despite the adults' best efforts to help Rosie cope with her anxieties, maturity alone can teach her to let others make their own mistakes and to accept the tragedies of life along with the miracles. As usual, Lamott's brand of winsome wisdom begins to grate just a bit (all of her characters are on intimate terms with Recovery jargon, and even Luther, whom Rosie finally meets, offers predictably mellow observations). But the greater depth, complexity, and seriousness here make up for the smiley faces and rainbows. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43521-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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