A slim bit of dialogue-heavy, lightweight fare that strains believability but gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its...
A writer struggles with a unique case of multiple-personality disorder in this farce, the first novel in over a decade from veteran screenwriter, director and actor Reiner (All Kinds of Love, 1993).
Middle-aged author Nat Noland doesn’t just talk to himself—he has extended, vociferous debates with himself, and that has understandably begun to trouble his wife, Glennie. That problem, combined with the fact that his fifth novel is turning into a blasphemous rewrite of Genesis, prompts him to call in a psychiatrist, Dr. Frucht, for some mental repair work. (Noland dubs each novel-in-progress “N,” making his fifth novel “NNNNN.”) The “empathologist” across the hall from Frucht, Dr. Gertrude Trampleasure, further upends Noland’s world when she tells him he looks remarkably like the man who broke her heart when she was a schoolgirl. Investigating further, Noland learns that he is, in fact, a triplet. His father, a greedy and detestable orphanage owner, seduced a traveling showgirl and convinced her to give the baby up for adoption; when she balked shortly before going into labor, he ran her car off the road, killing her, then performed a c-section to save the infants, which he sold separately to wealthy clients. At first glance, that’s not exactly fertile territory for a breezy comic novel, but Reiner has the right idea—the setup anchors the story and lends some legitimacy to the loopy subplots that follow (cases of mistaken identity are rampant). The final plot twist threatens to make the tale feel completely untenable, but like any self-respecting farce author, Reiner capably ties the various plot points together.
A slim bit of dialogue-heavy, lightweight fare that strains believability but gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its absurd premise and characters.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8669-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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