A haunting, dizzying meditation on identity and the blurred lines between life and art.
“The history of art is littered with the bodies of dead women.”
Artist Carey Logan made her name by creating hyper-realistic sculptures of bodies in various states of decay, including one memorable piece where body parts were buried, awaiting discovery. In 2008, Carey filled her rain boots with quick-drying cement and walked into a lake at an upstate New York property owned by her art collective, Pine City. Carey’s suicide “opened up the floodgates” for our unnamed narrator, a talented but struggling artist who had admired Carey since a brief but memorable encounter back when the narrator was an art student. In 2011, the pink-haired artist is 34, successful, and still living in an illegal New York loft that doubles as her studio. The series of large-scale paintings she’s spent the last two years working on—titled Humility, Obedience, Chastity, Modesty, Temperance, Purity, and Prudence—are scheduled to be shipped to Paris for a show, but they're all destroyed when the loft burns down. In desperation, the artist tells her gallerist that Prudence was the only casualty and is given a few months to fix it. She’s able to procure a space at Pine City and is allowed the use of Carey Logan’s old studio. The artist throws herself into her work and a passionate affair with Tyler Savage, who makes art out of black-market human organs and was Carey’s boyfriend. The other Pine City members are largely standoffish, and her burning questions about Carey and her rumored final work are decidedly unwelcome. The artist’s three months at the isolated compound are a menacing, swirling, hypnotic dance of parties, art, sex, and, ultimately, startling revelations. Bourland’s (I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, 2017) painstaking research on the practical and emotional aspects of making art is on vivid display. Readers eager for a glimpse into the New York art scene will be enthralled, but despite the glitz and glamour, it’s frequently a dehumanizing place to be, especially for women. After all, as the gallerist says: “Female painters are the bargain of the century.”
A haunting, dizzying meditation on identity and the blurred lines between life and art.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5951-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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