Southern California is See's home ground, and the skewering of its denizens' lifestyles her specialty (Golden Days, 1986), but, here, she breaks away with a vengeance, moving confidently into the world of international finance, pushing out to Japan and points west, letting dead men talk, and staining her home ground blood- red. The male voices are the first surprise, two very different males, polar opposites: Robin, a young beach-bum for whom life is having fun, and Jerry Bridges, a wealthy, middle-aged financier. Jerry loves money and the Orient; he is every bit as robust, and convincing, as Tom Wolfe's Sherman McCoy. We'll see him in action, in Tokyo to launch an American-Japanese co-venture; later on, prospecting along the Pacific Rim for a site for his ``twenty-first century city-state.'' Back home, he is king in his plush Pacific Palisades sanctuary, with the perfect (second) wife, Wynn, adorable little Josh and Tina, and a gorgeous teenage stepdaughter in Whitney (his coolness toward her masks a fierce physical desire). For Wynn, too, their home is a sanctuary, for she has moved up (and how!) from the ``dead, dank, rented bottom of the San Fernando Valley''; and, besides, Jerry is a kind man, a good man, even if forgetful of family occasions. Unfortunately, there are no sanctuaries; life is brittle, even in Pacific Palisades, for Whitney is injured in an auto accident and the driver (sweet, clowning Robin) is killed. Whitney heals, plunges back into life, loses her virginity on a Maui beach, only to die some months later, along with little Josh and 13 others, in a fiery multi-vehicle horror. Wynn has a breakdown, and Jerry (one of life's innocents, who has never seen a person die) is no help at all. Observing all this mayhem from his perch in an afterlife ruled by Buddha and Kali, Robin sends out his own delicate vibrations. See is wrestling with an old dilemma: How do you admit life's random violence into your fictional world without wrecking it? She is also (through a secondary, parallel story involving an English clairvoyant) suggesting the connectedness of all human lives. The result is flawed but fascinating: a novel that just radiates energy and marks a major step forward for this author.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1991
ISBN: 0-395-59221-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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