A debut short story collection depicts men in the 21st-century American South.
A college dropout drifts from his mother’s home to the dwelling of an older German lover whose husband is serving in Iraq. A graduate student comes to terms with his intersectional identity. A frustrated science professor methodically destroys his own marriage. The men in the 11 stories in Haraway’s collection are all faced with momentous decisions. They can create or destroy; they can move forward or stagnate. They can become—or not become—the men they are capable of being. Scattered across the South, from Tennessee to Texas (with the exception of one outlying story set in the Colorado Rockies), the author’s carefully crafted characters are products of their regions, families, and circumstances. Several of them are young, just figuring out how to be men, but others are careening into middle age or widowerhood. The heroes of “The Doughnut Rebellion” are old enough that they reside in a nursing home. At times, Haraway can be heavy-handed. In “Back to Zero,” a young white resident of Memphis discusses an overlooked African-American musician’s career with a friend and observes to himself: “I never thought much about privilege, the thousand moments like this where one life is easier than another one, where obstacles are got around.” This is an important realization for a young white man, to be sure—and demonstrates Haraway’s strong attention to a changing South and a transforming America—but revelations like these could be portrayed with more subtlety. In other places, however, the author’s attention to detail and rhythm is quite effective. In “Lucy and the Early Men,” the narrator describes an article he wrote about an archaeological site on Native American land adjacent to the U.S.–Mexican border wall: “Just a bit of history that had helped me understand the wall. The age of bones. Finding the fishing gear and the boat evidence. A bunch of weapons.” Lines like these demonstrate Haraway’s developing mastery of the short story form and show that this book—and any subsequent works from the author—is worth a reader’s attention. Well-crafted contemporary tales with Southern protagonists.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942956-25-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lamar University Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
