Lg. Prt. 0-375-70292-X Offering her well-known insight into humanity’s quirks, NPR commentator White (Sleeping at the Starlite Motel, 1995) makes the Georgia romance between an ardent plant pathologist and a flighty painter of birds the centerpiece of her first novel. Roger knows his way around a field of peanuts, but he fares less well in love. When his wife Ethel runs off with a Nashville musician (then dumps him for a New Hampshire boatwright), it ends the marriage but doesn—t sever ties to Roger’s in-laws, who continue to think of him as family. So it’s only natural that Roger is called on to help when Louise, Ethel’s mom, starts fretting about extraterrestrial visitors and getting lost after wandering from home. And it’s only natural, too, that the in-laws grow concerned when Roger shows an interest in a woman who, in a series of trips, brings nearly all of her household possessions to the dump, with a tidy note attached to each item. Della is an artist—and not a bad one, it turns out—whose dumpside sorties are caused by aesthetic despair: She just can—t manage to paint an old breed of chickens to her liking. After a fashion, she returns Roger’s affection, and the two conduct a courtship of sorts while much else goes on around them—Louise moves in with a typographer who appreciates her unique approach to letters; Ethel continues to play the field; Roger’s childhood horse succumbs to old age; camellias bloom; and thrips spread a deadly virus to the area’s peanut crop. All told, life in rural Georgia undergoes change in not-so-subtle ways. At end, Della flies away to Australia in search of new birds to paint, leaving lonely local hero Roger to carry on with his work. The pages resonate with White’s distinctive voice and dazzle with her naturalist’s eye for detail, making the strictly episodic nature of this tale less a drawback than a continuation of her familiar storytelling habits. (First printing of 150,000)
Pub Date: June 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44531-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
BOOK REVIEW
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