Once readers “get it,” the narrative conceit becomes less interesting—but Hitchcock would have loved the premise.
DeLeeuw debuts with a strange tale seething with disturbing psychological overtones.
We first meet Luke through his chance encounter with Daniel on a playground near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first the boys seem compatible in every way. They’re both imaginative 6-year-olds, comfortable playing games in which dinosaurs come to eat them and they save themselves by shooting the creatures with water guns. At her son’s insistence, Luke’s mother, Claire, agrees to let Daniel visit them in their posh New York apartment. Just as readers begin to wonder why Daniel’s parents never seem to be around and he never seems to have his own home to go to, it becomes clear that Daniel is an imaginary friend who conveniently showed up shortly after the divorce of Luke’s parents. He’s also the narrator of the novel. Eventually Daniel winds up occupying the no-man’s land between doppelgänger and Imp of the Perverse, “persuading” Luke to do heinous things like killing the family dog. It’s clear that Claire has her own problems when she has a breakdown and threatens to cut herself with shards of glass. After Claire is hospitalized, Luke (and Daniel) go to live with Luke’s father and his “new” family, which includes a stepsister Daniel finds thrillingly desirable. As Luke grows up, he cannot shake off the dire influence of Daniel, who becomes increasingly manipulative, forbidding and malevolent. When Luke goes to college, Daniel makes sure he succumbs to the lure of Richard, a charismatic but evil upperclassman who, to put it charitably, does not have Luke’s best interests at heart and soon has him snorting coke. Ultimately, Daniel gains more and more control over Luke, finally committing murder.
Once readers “get it,” the narrative conceit becomes less interesting—but Hitchcock would have loved the premise.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0313-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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
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