Two near-death experiences serve as bookends for this initially beguiling second novel about the interactions of the living, the dead, and the in-between.
For 15-year-old Charlie St. Cloud and his kid brother Sam, diehard Red Sox fans, Marblehead is the perfect hometown: neighborly and only 30 minutes from Boston’s Fenway Park. When Charlie decides to “borrow” a neighbor’s car to catch a night game, everything works out fine until he smashes into a tractor-trailer. A paramedic resuscitates him, but can’t save Sam. What to do? The devoted Charlie has promised Sam he’ll always be there for him. He’s able to make good on his word when Sam shows up in the cemetery. A ritual begins: every sundown for the next 13 years, Charlie and Sam meet to play ball. To keep their rendezvous, Charlie becomes the cemetery caretaker and sacrifices career opportunities, while Sam sacrifices his move to the next level of the spirit world. This could be unbearably sappy, but it’s not; Sherwood grounds these curious trysts in small-town realities. Eventually a complication arrives: Tess Carroll, expert sailor, preparing for a solo round-the-world race. She runs into Charlie at the cemetery, and they both see stars. Things get serious fast. Should Charlie put Tess before Sam? How much do the living owe the dead? It’s a good set-up, but Sherwood ruins it by misdirecting the reader. It turns out Tess herself may be dead. Her sloop is missing, and search-and-rescue missions are underway. Regardless, Tess and Charlie proceed to have sex in an awkward, unsettling scene that borders on necrophilia. Sherwood further fuzzes up the picture by seeming to change the rules that govern human/spirit relations in the middle of the game. A disappointing successor to The Man Who Ate the 747 (2000). There’s a big audience out there for imaginative treatments of the afterlife (look at The Lovely Bones), provided the author keeps control of the material, which is not the case here.
Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80220-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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