Rice has recovered from some gaily slipshod work, but this feels first-draftish, as if e-mailed straight to the printer...
The Queen of the Vampires offers one of the more wobbly works in the Vampire Chronicles.
After a 40-page opening of heavy exposition (a glance backward that adds little but reminds us of the major players), the big attraction here is the return of gorgeous baby vamp Claudia, the 70-year-old in a 7-year-old’s body, cremated a quarter-century ago in Interview with the Vampire (1976). Lestat also returns, though, sadly, Rice keeps these two lively creations offstage until the end. Again set in New Orleans, Merrick tells of octoroon Merrick Mayfair, an orphan raised among voodoo folks but now taken under the wing of David Talbot of the Talamasca, an ancient order of psychic scholars, so her powers of witchcraft might be studied. We follow her through her first 34 years as the Talamasca’s top scholar and earner while Lestat goes comatose but for the joys of his Mozart CDs. Ravishingly handsome Louis de Pointe du Lac, his closest companion, worries that Lestat blames himself for Claudia’s death and that her spirit is in torment. Louis wants Talbot to have Merrick use her magic to bring back Claudia and free Lestat from his torpor—but first Talbot must take Merrick to a lost Guatemalan temple to recover a jade mask for this purpose. Talbot, at 75, had an affair with young Merrick, but because Lestat won’t make Merrick a vampire, Talbot sees their love as doomed. Then Merrick seemingly falls for Louis—but Louis won’t give her the Dark Gift either and lead her into Lestat’s coven. Rice whets our appetite for the wondrously seductive child, Claudia, then, to delay satisfaction, offers us Merrick’s childhood and young womanhood instead. But when Claudia does show up and Lestat awakes, both are minor figures in a thickly descriptive tapestry that engages only in bursts.
Rice has recovered from some gaily slipshod work, but this feels first-draftish, as if e-mailed straight to the printer without a second thought, while the arch dialogue already feels a hundred years old.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-45448-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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