In all her best work, Roiphe (The Pursuit of Happiness, 1991, etc.) has mined the depth of human love and exposed its secret lode of sorrow. Here, she does it again in a gently funny, ultimately serious, heartfelt story about the risks of middle-age love. Leah Rose meets Ollie Marcus when she plunges into the surf on a fall afternoon to help him rescue his retarded adult sister, Sally—a portentous action, as it turns out. Leah, in her early 40s, is a biologist on sabbatical from her lab, living in the beach house she inherited from her parents. Ollie, about the same age, is a high-school English teacher who lives in the house where he grew up and takes care of his sister. Sally is saved that fall day—and some small spark is ignited between Leah and Ollie. It smolders quietly for a while—these two have been alone for a long time and they're used to it. So when things finally do flame, they're frightened. Life is so bright, it makes them wary. Ollie backs off. Leah voices her concerns, by telephone, to her best friend, Myrna. And even though Myrna seems tiresome and monomaniacal in the exchanges we hear—we learn more than we ever wanted to know about how her bathroom smells—she does come up with some pointed advice: ``Be careful,'' she cautions Leah. ``There's a reason he's still available.'' There is. But, of course, there are reasons Leah is still available too. What they both have to figure out is where fear ends and trust begins. Finding that spot takes far more courage than jumping into the icy sea on a fall day—and, ultimately, it's worth every shiver. A coming-of-age in middle-age. Roiphe shows us a new facet of first love here—slightly worn, but its shine is deep.
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-75430-7
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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