A vivid story about a community of scarred, deeply human souls within a callous, indifferent America.
Poignant tale of a Mexican American community in El Paso facing the legacy of child prostitution.
Poet and novelist Sáenz (The House of Forgetting, 1997) is well attuned to the plight of these very real-seeming characters: a young Mexican man, Andrés Segovia, coming to terms with having been sexually abused as a boy, is arrested in a drunken brawl and turns to the gringo pro-bono lawyer, Dave, who has gotten him out of scrapes before. When the man Andrés has beat up dies—a sex offender out on parole whom Andrés remembers raping him at age 12—Dave hands his case over to a kind of miracle-working lawyer of the underdog, Grace Delgado, a widow who has plenty of troubles of her own. At 50, she has just been diagnosed with breast cancer, although she eschews any treatment; her grown son, Mister, has married a woman Grace doesn’t like, and the two inform her they plan to adopt the child of severely dysfunctional parents, further straining relations among them all. As Grace works patiently with Andrés, his horrific story unravels: orphaned when his parents were killed in a car accident, he and his siblings tried to make a self-sufficient life for themselves, until his beloved brother, Mando, ran afoul of the law and the younger children became prey to criminals who robbed them of their youth. In brisk, short, stream-of-consciousness chapters, Sáenz keeps these several strains of the story simmering: Dave struggles with his guilty conscious while Grace, confronting her own crisis of mortality, attains a kind of religious redemption in helping Andrés, who in turn needs to find a purpose to live. Mister’s attempts at adoption of the troubled toddler convulses the plot tragically, although Sáenz saves the mess from turning into a bloodbath by carefully delineating his characters.
A vivid story about a community of scarred, deeply human souls within a callous, indifferent America.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-077920-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
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