A second collection from Lott (after A Dream of Old Leaves, 1989) comprised of a novella and 16 stories, many of which document the slow, sad movements of characters from his earlier works. The novella ``After Leston,'' which opens the volume, sets the tone: understated despair. Jewel Hilburn (the narrator of Jewel, 1991) describes the routines of her days with Brenda Kay, her retarded daughter, and reminisces about the death of her husband and her struggle to adjust to a new life in California as a widow. Most of Lott's stories proceed in similar fashion, seeming not so much narratives as character sketches. In ``Open House,'' a working-class couple acts out its fantasy of owning a house by placing a phony bid on a mansion. In ``From Ulysses, Kansas,'' a grown man whose brother has just died in a car wreck tries and fails to voice his anger toward their estranged father. The unemployed and increasingly desperate family man of ``Driveway'' cannot bring himself to tell his wife and children that their dog has been killed. The nearly broke couple who move into a motel and try to make a new start in ``The Day After Tomorrow'' find themselves haunted by a ghoulish desk clerk whose insane ramblings and insinuations convince them that they are in fact doomed. Throughout, Lott creates a landscape of almost unremitting pain, a world where hidden griefs, too deeply felt to be denied, are never far beneath the surface. Although the sorrow that pervades the lives of his characters is credible and palpable, the rhetorical restraint of the narration—``Now the kids only made it out on holidays, the rest of the time Carol and I went out by ourselves. I felt like we had lost the kids after that, like they had died''- -gives the work a flatness and monotony that quickly become tedious. A sharp eye whose clarity is deadened by a too tightly closed voice. Lott (Reed's Beach, 1993, etc.) needs to come up for air.
Pub Date: July 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-89587-140-8
Page Count: 201
Publisher: John F. Blair
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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