Didactic, often wearingly so, but interesting as an example of the kind of storytelling the powers that be don’t want heard.
A dystopian portrait of China in 2013, where the populace is both muzzled and soothed by state-controlled capitalism.
As the introduction to this intriguing if often plodding novel explains, the book is not officially sold in China, presumably because authorities find its criticism of Communist leadership too provocative. The novel has enjoyed success as samizdat, though, and like its obvious brethren, 1984 and Brave New World, it’s a grim fable that makes stark distinctions between oppressed and oppressor. The novel’s hero is Lao Chen, a middle-aged writer living in Beijing who’s enjoying the country’s economic boom. China has taken advantage of America’s economic collapse (Starbucks is now owned by a Chinese firm), and Lao is rich enough to spend his days as he pleases. Two acquaintances unsettle his comfy lifestyle: Fang Caodi, who insists that the state has erased the country’s collective memory of an entire crucial month, and Little Xi, whose online protests of the country’s post-Tiananmen crackdowns are deleted almost as fast as she can post them. Lao’s eventual political enlightenment is predictable, and convenient chess-piece characters are deployed to either defend the regime or sound alarms. Yet the insights aren’t always as simplistic as the characters; Little Xi’s son, an aspiring propagandist, stars in several bracing scenes that explore the philosophy of repression and groupthink. Unfortunately, the book’s narrative thrust stops cold in the novel’s epilogue, which consumes nearly a third of the book; in it, a Party functionary opines on China’s economic dominance, and how far its policy of thought control will go. In an endnote, the novel’s translator reports that Chinese readers find this section especially compelling, which may speak to how badly China is hurting for art that speaks truth to power.
Didactic, often wearingly so, but interesting as an example of the kind of storytelling the powers that be don’t want heard.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53434-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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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