Once again, Boyd (The Revolution of Little Girls, 1991, etc.) leads her intriguing characters through complex psychological, sexual, and philosophical mazes in this story of a clever southern belle turned radical lesbian, but the author fails to synthesize the parts of her story into a satisfying whole. Ellen Sommers has survived her typically wacko southern upper- class childhood to marry a nice boy from Harvard, land a good job at a small Boston publishing house, and greet the year 1970 with a hefty backlog of such trendy literary successes as Black Black Black and The Terminal Brassiere. But when beautiful artist/heiress Artemis Foote signs up to do an illustrated book, Ellen falls madly in love, follows Artemis back to her California commune, and soon divorces her husband and quits her editorial job. Unable to attach herself to Artemis, Ellen (who now calls herself ``Rain'') instead initiates an affair with Artemis's ex-lover, Jordan, who's on the run after having helped a boyfriend bomb a campus building and is in grief over having abandoned her daughter. When Jordan's whereabouts are discovered by the FBI, she and Rain flee cross- country until Jordan is apprehended and jailed. Rain goes into free-fall, staying for a while in a mental hospital and then moving to L.A., where she writes for TV and engages in cynical sex-only affairs. Just as she begins to find her balance again, Jordan, newly released from prison, commits suicide. Ellen goes into free- fall once more, this time moving in with a suicidal ex-debutante in her hometown of Charleston. A final reunion with Artemis, now middle-aged, gives the two women a chance to reminisce about the passions of their youth. But despite Ellen's stubborn and sympathetic search for meaning in the random turns her life has taken, she remains as clueless as her readers. Boyd's talent for creating convincingly tangled psychological webs is undeniable, but her novels are as unshaped as life itself.
Pub Date: June 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43008-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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