A patient, artfully controlled work about memory, regret and love.
A father and son travel to China in an attempt to bridge their 25-year estrangement in Leung’s debut novel (World Famous Love Acts: Stories, 2004).
Westen Chan is eight years old when his American mother Celia is struck and killed by a car near their Los Angeles home. His distraught father, Xin, decides for reasons he keeps secret that Westen should live with his wife’s childless aunt and uncle on their farm in Washington state and be reared as an American. Although the aunt and uncle treat Westen lovingly, he never understands why he had to lose his father after his mother died. As he matures into a sensitive but emotionally reserved man, Westen resists falling in love with anyone until he meets Gideon, an older man who is dying of AIDS. He and Gideon live chastely together until Gideon’s death. Sometime afterward, Westen, now 32, receives a letter from his father inviting him on the trip to his homeland. Their reunion is awkward. As they travel with a small tour group through China, Westen cannot resist expressing his deep resentment, although he knows that is not the sum of his feelings toward his father. Unbeknownst to Westen, Xin is dying and needs to explain why he left Westen behind, but he has trouble conveying his complex motive, which factors in Xin’s own father’s disapproval of his marriage to Celia; Xin’s failure to defend Celia from a rape; and his fear of not protecting Westen in a foreign culture. The story is presented in alternating short chapters from the son’s perspective and the father’s. Each chapter begins with a formal heading (e.g. “The father and son arrive at Confucius’s Temple; the son recalls a trip to Disneyland.”). The effect is that of touring a progression of tableaus, which contrasts powerfully with the roiling feelings father and son are incapable of expressing.
A patient, artfully controlled work about memory, regret and love.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-35164-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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