Brilliant, entropic fiction that sometimes spins off into its own narcissistic void.
SoCal chronicler extraordinaire (Still Holding, 2003, etc.) goes deep with a portrait of a terminally self-destructive family.
After lightening up a bit in his previous novel (The Chrysanthemum Palace, 2005), Wagner returns to a more savage tone with this baleful look at a subculture in abysmal decline. Members of the long-broken-up Herlihy family are living separate lives, each being screwed over in horrendous ways. Ray, who deserted his two children years ago, is an aging fella who doesn’t enjoy much anymore except for Twilight Zone reruns and the company of his moody, young, Indian girlfriend. When the police mistakenly break down Ray’s door and shoot his dog before realizing Ray’s not the perp they want, a classic Los Angeles civil suit goes quickly into motion. Marj, Ray’s dotty ex, just lost her new husband and is sucked into an elaborate con by a team of cold-blooded grifters, who take the scam to lengths almost too painful to read. Ray and Marj’s daughter Joan, a striving architect, is hired by a billionaire to design a memorial honoring two of his relatives (and nobody else) who died in the Southeast Asian tsunami. When not delivering furious interior monologues (“she was merely a skinsack of Diet Coke sugarwater and ruined eggs”), Joan sleeps with all the wrong men and hates herself for it. Last and least is Chester, a film-location scout whose life is lost in a fog of pot smoke and bad schemes until he’s accidentally wounded during a staged gag for a Punk’d-style TV show (inspiring another promising civil suit). Like its subjects/targets, the story occasionally gets lost in self-reflection. Wagner’s prose is, nevertheless, a force of nature, and laser-sharp in its selection of Hollywood sitting ducks.
Brilliant, entropic fiction that sometimes spins off into its own narcissistic void.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7235-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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
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