The history is consistently more surprising than the fiction in this grandly scaled epic of a turbulent period.
A veteran of Victorian intrigue (Execution Dock, 2009, etc.) trains her sights on the late 13th century, when the powerful of Rome and Byzantium were just as unscrupulous and prone to violence.
Anna Zarides’ brother Justinian has been pronounced guilty of murdering Bessarion Comnenos, who bitterly opposed the empire’s union with Rome. Anna comes to Constantinople hoping to find evidence that will vindicate her twin, now exiled to Judea, and she protects herself in the vast, strange city by assuming the disguise of a eunuch. As the physician Anastasius Zarides, she steadily builds a thriving practice, assisted in large part by the support of Bessarion’s magnetic, monstrous mother-in-law, Zoe Chrysaphes, whose “supreme skill” is poisoning her enemies by inventive means that anticipate Lucrezia Borgia. But for all her success in attracting patients and keeping her gender secret—even from Captain Giuliano Dandolo, the attractive Venetian aristocrat who soon wins her heart—Anna is agonizingly slow in working her way into the confidence of Bishop Constantine, Justinian’s patron, who hides a thousand secrets. History, meanwhile, is moving far more rapidly than Anna. A series of revolving-door popes seek a rapprochement between East and West that amounts to a subjection of the Orthodox Church even as Charles of Anjou, King of Naples and the Two Sicilies, works tirelessly to promote another crusade against Byzantium. Perry, who’s chosen her period (1273–82) with a canny eye for drama, makes this complex historical background both vivid and clear without any grandstanding (apart from an ill-judged walk-on by ten-year-old Dante Alighieri). She’s less successful in creating characters capable of embodying both the salient historical conflicts and the illusion of independent lives of their own; they always behave exactly as you’d expect.
The history is consistently more surprising than the fiction in this grandly scaled epic of a turbulent period.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-50065-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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