A pleasantly ambiguous psychological-suspense novel from Anshaw (the award-winning Aquamarine, 1991), who shows us once again that a good story can be told as much by what it holds back as by what it offers. When Christine Snow's girlfriend Taylor disappears without a trace one morning, Christine is at first reluctant to panic. This has more to do with Christine than with Taylor: Like all good psychotherapists, Christine has been trained to let problems reveal themselves slowly and with a minimum of overt speculation, and this emotional reticence will itself provide the best clue to Taylor's fate. ``Making love with women,'' Christine says, ``is the easiest thing for me to do with them. Everything else leaps so quickly into difficult and complicated.'' This attitude has assured her many friends but few mates over the years, and for a long time she pretends not to mind Taylor's absence. Eventually, though, she realizes that her independence is less complete than she imagines and, once she sees this, she takes on the task of finding Taylor. This finally carries Christine as far as Morocco, where Taylor had lived for some time under the influence of a strange religious visionary and the motley coterie that encircled her. Taylor's story, like all good mysteries, becomes murkier and more troubling as it proceeds, and Christine eventually discovers that she is looking for quite a different woman than the one she thought she knew—which, in turn, suggests that a similar reorientation of Christine's own personality may be in store. By the time we arrive at the last chapter, we find that the loose ends and ambiguities are beside the point, and it isn't troubling to find them unresolved. The real skill of Anshaw's narrative is that it makes the reader understand and appreciate Christine's changing perceptions at every stage of the action. Clever, well-crafted, and deft: Anshaw draws her characters with an unsparing hand that is guided by a remarkably sympathetic eye. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-69131-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
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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