Even though Vine’s characters invariably find waiting such a losing game, her loyal readership may want to wait till next...
Years after she caused her teenaged lover’s accidental death, claustrophobic Clodagh Brown is once again mixed up in deeds that are bound to end fatally—but none too soon—in this intricate, rather febrile exercise in the delayed payoff.
Many of Ruth Rendell’s previous nine novels under the Vine byline (The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy, 1998, etc.) have focused on dysfunctional surrogate families, and once again Clodagh, scarred by the climbing accident that killed her friend Daniel Fleetwood but even more terrified of enclosed spaces than of dizzying heights, is only part of the ill-assorted menagerie who’ve found haven at 15 Russia Road in the quiet district of Maida Vale. The others, united only by their shared love of climbing London’s roofs, are Wim, a gifted amateur acrobat; Liv, an agoraphobic runaway who feels free only when she’s well away from street level; Jonny, a sociopath attracted by the idea of entering those invitingly open windows below; and Silver, whose pleasure it is to take all the others into his home. The mixture is obviously explosive, and the first half of the story—especially the counterbalancing family portrait of Clodagh’s lordly cousin and his sitcom star wife, who evidently take in their poor relation expressly in order to sneer at her—is as ominously accomplished as anything in Vine. But Clodagh and Silver’s fascination with a pair of foster parents on the lam from authorities who insist that the boy they’ve taken in be adopted by a mixed-race household is distracting, unconvincing, and worked out with a lack of conviction rare for a master of long-deferred doom; and the elaborate fictional edifice ends up crumbling rather than building to a peak.
Even though Vine’s characters invariably find waiting such a losing game, her loyal readership may want to wait till next year just this once.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-609-60789-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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