An ambitious first novel by literary scholar Herron that sets out to create, in established epic form, a mythic exploration of traditional institutions and racial identity in America. Divided into 24 books, the story alternates between passages of incantatory prose and the more realistic account of the Snowdon family, whose tragic legacy is meant to parallel that of other great mythic families. The Washington, D.C., Snowdon family is affluent and black; father John Christian is a noted heart surgeon; wife Camille, beautiful but passive, tends her roses; and the three daughters—Cynthia Jane, Patricia, and Eva—lead privileged lives of expensive schools and travel. But a family chosen for an epic role must suffer some monstrous flaw or tragedy, and the Snowdons, sensitive and gifted as they all are, certainly do. Father John Christian and daughter Patricia love each other too much, and their daughter, Johnnie, is born. Sister Eva, also incestuous in her own innocent way, is raped and goes temporarily mad; and deeply religious Cynthia Jane flees her family to become a nun. Meanwhile, Johnnie, mute for the first 14 years of her life, lives secretly with her mother in Georgetown. But when Patricia, overwhelmed by her bleak visions, drowns herself in the Potomac, Johnnie sets off on a mini-odyssey to find out the truth about granddad/daddy, the two aunts, and grandmother Camille, who watched it all happen. And because this is more than a story about a troubled family, an apocalypse is hinted at, the past is revisited, and Johnnie is ``condemned to immortality'' as a light haunting a destroyed Washington. Vividly written and bold in concept, but the thematic intentions here are too strained and the story not quite up to it. Herron has tried to do too much.
Pub Date: April 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-57644-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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