Plain reading: no troubling shadings to complicate or disturb.
A divorced father, fearing the influence of his ruthlessly social-climbing ex, kidnaps his baby daughter and heads to the hills—until his past and the police catch up.
Brilliant lawyer Donald Wolf is a straight-arrow kind of guy and a romantic soul who wants to marry and have kids. An associate in a leading New York firm, he thinks that in Lillian, a legal secretary who loves art, he’s met the perfect woman. While Lillian is curiously reticent about her family and past, Donald is too smitten to ask questions. Nor is he particularly curious when Mr. Buzley, her boss, gives them a lavish wedding gift. Once married, Lillian spends money freely and befriends the rich couple who live in the penthouse. Next she’s dragging Donald to glamorous parties and complaining they don’t have enough money. When she gets pregnant, they decide to take a trip to Italy, where Lillian studied art and where Donald, already tired of Lillian’s greedy ways, learns more about her past—not good—and asks for a divorce. Lillian gives birth to daughter Bettina, and, now married to Mr. Buzley, lives in style. But soon Donald, who sees Bettina regularly in the park with her nanny, learns that Lillian is cheating on Buzley. An accident involving Bettina convinces Donald that life with Lillian would be bad for her, and he so kidnaps the two-year-old, takes a false name, and heads for a small hill-town in Georgia, where years pass, he becomes a respected citizen, and makes himself helpful to ailing farmer Clarence Benson, his pretty wife Kate, and their young son Rick. Aware that the police are looking for him, Donald never leaves town, but his past catches up with him when he goes to Bettina’s college graduation. His life unravels as lies and secrets come to light—but this is Belva Plain (Looking Back, 2001, etc. etc.), and happiness lies ahead.
Plain reading: no troubling shadings to complicate or disturb.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-33472-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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