The many different elements in this novel—including environmentalists, dowsing, and family loyalty—converge in a smooth and natural flow. Narrator Scottie—who notes that his childhood nickname has stuck long past appropriateness—is an attorney who lives in Landaff, Vt., with his wife, Laura, whose family is known for being strange, and for being able to locate water. Laura's confrontational sister, Patience, has particularly strong abilities and has also located oil, lost children, and missing valuables. Scottie and Laura have a young daughter, Miranda, who appears to be developing as quite a dowser as well, and Patience is eager, perhaps too eager, to take over her education. Scottie is representing a ski resort called Powder Peak in its bid for expansion, a project which has brought him into opposition with a local environmentalist state senator, who also happens to be engaged to Patience. This family connection might seem too facile, but Bohjalian does an impressive job painting Landaff as ``the sort of town where everyone is indeed related to everyone, and the town meeting that occurs on the first Tuesday of every March is as much a family reunion as it is an exercise in legislative self- determination.'' In the past, Bohjalian (Past the Bleachers, 1992, etc.) has faltered on plot points, relying on clichÇ to bring things together, but here his tempered voice finds its narrative niche, whether describing the peaceful setting with rumblings of discontent just under the surface, the circus-like arena of environmental politics (those opposing expansion form a group called ``Citizens Opposed to the Powder Peak Environmental Rape''), or Scottie's own internal struggles. Subtlety is key. When Scottie and fourth-grader Miranda spot catamounts on the mountain, he knows that expansion must be stopped and abruptly switches sides. Bohjalian slips in information about catamounts, dowsing, Y rods and the like without ever sounding preachy or falling out of Scottie's cohesive voice. Buoyant and brilliant.
Pub Date: March 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-87451-687-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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