A seriously playful novel about the interweave of literature and life.
Another literary high-wire performance by a novelist who is establishing himself as a unique voice in contemporary fiction.
This novel shares significant qualities with its predecessor (An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England, 2007), which provided a critical breakthrough for Clarke. Both have protagonists who are good-hearted, well-intentioned and self-delusional, thus as unreliable as they are likable. And both have a metafictional, book-about-books quality. In this case, as the title suggests, the creative springboard is Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, a memoirist novel that itself confuses the real with the imagined. Here is what the reader knows for sure: Nine-year-old Miller lives in Watertown, N.Y., with his mother, a lawyer specializing in domestic-abuse cases among the military. His father, whom Miller loves and who left the family, is obsessed with Exley’s novel, so much so that its setting brought him to Watertown. Miller is so precociously intelligent that he has leapfrogged to the eighth grade. He narrates most of the novel. He also sees a therapist to help him deal with the absence of his father and his inability to distinguish the actual from the imaginary (a coping mechanism). The therapist develops some identity issues of his own. Miller’s father may have been a professor, an alcoholic, an adulterer, or all or none of them. Miller is convinced that his father enlisted to fight in the war in Iraq, and has returned from combat in critical condition to the local VA hospital. He also believes that if he can find Exley he will save his father’s life. Yet Exley in real life is dead, according to a biography by Jonathan Yardley (the book critic who also emerges as a character here). “Sometimes you have to tell the truth about what you’ve done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven’t done,” says Miller, who is in for as many surprises as the reader.
A seriously playful novel about the interweave of literature and life.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-608-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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