A moving and well-crafted tale, written over the course of ten years, that successfully melds the fictional Lili with...
Wang’s first novel written in English: a compelling account of the emotional and political awakening of a tormented young Chinese woman who grew up during the Cultural Revolution.
When her parents, music teachers from Beijing, were sent to the countryside for “re-education,” 12-year-old Lili was ordered to spy on them, and was eventually raped by the Party Secretary. At the opening of this bracing first-person tale, time has passed and Lili is in prison for corrupt lifestyle and hooliganism. Released, she moves in with her parents, now back in Beijing, where they live a “domestic cold war.” Embittered and frustrated, Lili finds pleasure only in playing the erhu, the Chinese violin, until she meets Roy Goldstein, an American journalist with a passion for China and soon for Lili. His work takes him around the country, often accompanied by Lili, meeting peasants, artists, and monks—and giving the author an opportunity to depict life in late-1980s China, something she does with skill and sensitivity. Roy is an endearing character, gentle and sweet, constantly challenging the status quo yet at times hopelessly naïve (e.g., when his well-meaning attempt to adopt an abandoned baby girl ends in tragedy). But the strength of this insightful story lies in the transformation of Lili; respected and loved for the first time in her bleak and marginal life, she begins to feel Roy’s hope. And during the occupation of Tiananmen Square, she’s drawn to the students’ conviction; she can’t stay away. At the close, Roy has been deported, and Lili and her father are witnessing the massacre together.
A moving and well-crafted tale, written over the course of ten years, that successfully melds the fictional Lili with China’s recent history. Not an easy task.Pub Date: June 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-42085-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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