Gothic goings-on served up without a trace of irony. (First published in England, 1963)
Good brother and bad brother feud on the fells.
Kate Mitchell takes a job as secretary to writer Maurice Rossiter, who lives with his brother Logan and three elderly uncles in a windswept house called Tor-Fret, known for years as the House of Men, since no female could stand its isolation or comprehend the dark doings and vicious quarrels that still seem to echo from every shadowy corner. Yes, the Rossiter men—excepting Logan—were and still are hard-drinking womanizers (the ragged lunatic who skulks around the house is none other than the by-blow of the brothers’ grandfather). Though blessed with masculine beauty, Maurice was always a twisted sort given to consorting with decadent poseurs. But since being stricken with polio, his chief pleasures are whining, driving the servants crazy, and conducting an illicit affair with Logan’s fiancée, Noreen Badcliff. Sharp-eyed Kate witnesses a tryst between the two at the river and looks away when they swim naked together. But who is the bald man watching from above through binoculars? And, later, how did Logan nearly break his neck when out for a walk on the misty fells? Logan, a redoubtable giant of a man, is apparently pretty easy to knock over and never even heard his lunatic half-brother sneaking up on him. Still, Kate falls madly in love with Logan when he rescues her from an assault by her former love Arthur. Her parents cluck and rub their hands, but she makes the long trek to Tor-Fret and finds a knack for overhearing the quarrels and mutterings of its inhabitants. Maurice’s deep dark secret and his reckless dalliance with Noreen lead to tragedy as Logan and Kate are overcome by a gang of village thugs in league with Maurice and left for dead. Yet the sun will rise on a new life for all—this being the late, ever-prolific Cookson.
Gothic goings-on served up without a trace of irony. (First published in England, 1963)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58547-070-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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