How the Ramones (and rock’s original anti-heroes, The Who) save the day, is the pleasing twist to this sweet...
Boy meets God, boy gets girl, boy loses girl and God, all to a soundtrack by Dee Dee Ramone.
When Francis Kelly was a kid, he had one of those religious experiences his older sister Clare had read about but never believed could really happen . . . but it did. Not that she’s going to cut him any slack; he’s still her dorky little brother whose only saving grace is that he shares her taste in music, specifically the punk-rock bands of the late ’70s and ’80s. Francis doesn’t quite know what to do about the whole moment-of-ecstasy thing, either, so he and Clare, the unsentimental, wise-cracking narrator of this family’s story, just go on with their day-to-day lives, which include ragging on their Catholic activist parents, cadging under-age admittance to music clubs and going to Sunday mass. Years pass. Both kids go to college and then settle in Boston. Their parents move to Central America to continue their missionary work and lecture the hierarchy of the Catholic Church from afar. Clare becomes a hospice nurse. Francis sets up youth groups for the diocese. His musical knowledge and kindness make him a hit. Years pass. Clare gets married, has two kids, wonders if Francis should have become a priest all along, until the day he meets the girl of his dreams, Lourdes, an oncologist at Mass General Hospital. They marry and all’s right with the world until tragedy drives them apart and no amount of prayer or healing masses can change things. About the same time, the Cardinal Francis works for is implicated in a pedophilia scandal, and Francis’s crisis of faith becomes a full-blown hatred for God, a dark night of the soul that can be assuaged only by the rank rage of the punk rock heroes of Clare and Francis’s youth.
How the Ramones (and rock’s original anti-heroes, The Who) save the day, is the pleasing twist to this sweet Nick-Hornby-meets-Graham-Greene tragi-comedy from Halpin (Donorboy, 2004, etc.).Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6278-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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