Celebrating the importance of illusion and accident, Shields’s beautifully crafted stories capture her characters’ shocked...
``We cannot live without our illusions,'' muses one of the characters in this exuberant collection, stating a theme that Shields turns to repeatedly in 22 precise, penetrating tales.
The dazzling title story traces the play of hope and fantasy in the lives of a series of townspeople over the course of one seemingly uneventful day, their quotidian acts revealing those stubborn, regenerative ``cycles of consolation and enhancement'' with which we overcome despair. In ``The Scarf,'' a middleaged writer, amazed by the unexpected success of her novel, comes to grips with the limitations of her talent during a lunch with an old friend. In less assured hands such epiphanies might seem unsurprising, but the prolific Shields (Larry’s Party, 1997, etc.) creates characters with such believable complexities of behavior that their discoveries are fresh and convincing. In ``Dressing Down,'' a ten-year-old boy spends the summer at a nudist camp his grandfather founded, discovering there how the battle over reticence and frankness has defined his grandparents’ marriage—and learning also that nudity tends to dissolve possibility and mystery, making people more prosaic than alluring. ``Eros'' follows the reveries of a middleaged survivor of breast cancer as she looks back at her long, slow discovery of sex, from her first childhood suspicions of its presence in the lives of her parents to its impact on her nowdissolved marriage. Loss has taught her that, while sex provides no ultimate liberation, it plays a vital role in helping people for a moment to feel ``part of the blissful, awakened world.'' In the terse ``New Music,'' writing the biography of a minor composer transforms its author, giving her and her family a startled appreciation of imagination’s power to remake life.
Celebrating the importance of illusion and accident, Shields’s beautifully crafted stories capture her characters’ shocked discovery of the gap between imagination and reality—and their ability to find happiness despite this in the “opening, beckoning, sensuous world.”Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88921-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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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