Sometimes a bit heavy on the atmosphere but nonetheless an affecting thriller that mixes just the right gothic chills with...
An erotic and creepy debut about an Australian teacher who tempts fate by sleeping with the father of one of her students.
In a small town in Tasmania, the just-out-of-college Kate Byrne is carrying on an affair with Thomas, the distant and rather callous father of Lucien, a member of Kate’s fourth-grade class. Besides the usual worries about discovery, Kate is increasingly preoccupied with Thomas’s wife, Veronica, who has just published a true crime book called Murder at Black Swan Point, about a case whose similarities to Kate’s situation are more than a little troubling: a mother who discovers that her husband is having an affair with the younger woman who works at his clinic—and has sometimes watched after their kids—kills the adulteress and then disappears. Kate is concerned also about Lucien, a gifted and almost preternaturally wise child whose writing and drawings are full of anger and death—perhaps brought on by his presumably cold home life and Veronica’s grisly research. Disagreeing with many of the conclusions in Veronica’s book, Kate spends time imagining her own version, hers told by indigenous animals and targeted at children—with fanciful little shards of this story slotted in between the novel’s increasingly claustrophobic and surreal chapters. Hooper—a confident if occasionally show-offy first-timer—doesn’t provide much forward movement; the narrative progresses mostly in Kate’s head as memories of her own past blur into her imaginings of other people’s pasts and presents. At first, it’s difficult to see why Kate would ever willingly thrust herself into such a precarious position, setting herself up to be dealt with in a bloody fashion by a murder-obsessed Veronica, but Hooper deftly manuevers the reader to Kate’s fragile point of view, with its obsessions—killing, writing—that are reminiscent of Susanna Moore’s In the Cut.
Sometimes a bit heavy on the atmosphere but nonetheless an affecting thriller that mixes just the right gothic chills with erotically charged suspense.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2512-0
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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