The voice is remarkable, but there is too much padding of what is a rather slight story.
Hodgen (Hello, I Must Be Going, 2006, etc.) has structured this novel as a series of “elegies” that a young woman addresses to five major, if occasionally inadvertent influences in her life.
The first, most deeply felt elegy—to Mary Murphy’s Uncle Michael (1952-89)—describes Mary’s less-than-stable New England childhood in the 1970s and ’80s. When her strikingly beautiful mother Margaret, who changes men frequently, lets Michael move in between husbands, he takes on an outsized fatherly role in Mary’s life. But when he moves away, he slips out of Mary and her family’s life all too easily and permanently. In this section, Hodgen creates several fully realized, heartbreaking histories in small, indelible strokes. The subsequent elegies lack the same impact. Elwood LePoer (1971-90) is a classmate of Mary’s before he drops out of high school to work on cars and dies at 19 in a freak accident. He is a loser whom Mary barely knows. His importance is a matter of coincidence—his unwillingness to give Mary’s sister Malinda a ride while she is hitchhiking with Mary and Margaret causes Margaret to meet her fourth husband, the saintly black man Walter, who becomes Mary’s mentor. Carson Washington (1972-93) is Mary’s roommate during her freshman year in college. The girls bond as outsiders on scholarship. The fourth elegy also concerns a person Mary knows only briefly. James Butler (1952-96) is a Juilliard-trained piano player whom Mary meets in Maine while looking for Malinda, who has disappeared. He hides his kindness behind his wit and makes sure Mary attends grad school. When he dies of AIDS, she inherits his musical compositions. In the final elegy, for Margaret, Mary ends up adopting Malinda’s abandoned son and making peace with her much-married mother before Margaret’s death.
The voice is remarkable, but there is too much padding of what is a rather slight story.Pub Date: July 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06140-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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