This small-town drama is jam-packed with revelations and sweet portraits that stick.
An ambitious debut novel that will make you cry, cringe, and laugh.
In 1967, two women—Bette Parsons, the mother of five, and Alice McFee—disappear from a rural town in Canada called Fraser Arm. The scars left by this mystery lay the groundwork for the novel. “Sometimes pain brings people together, helps them to cross the grand abyss of human discord,” says Lulu Parsons, one of Bette's children, as she begins narrating the story years later. “Sometimes it’s too late.” Higdon lovingly excavates the truth behind the women's disappearance, a story buried beneath years of secrecy, trauma, and small-town drama—but does not hesitate to add plenty of salt to the wounds first. There are gaspworthy moments from the beginning to the very last chapter. Though the character count might seem intimidating, Higdon successfully fills Fraser Arm with complex characters who grow and change as the novel unfurls. For example, Doris Tenpenny, the preacher’s daughter, who is mute but sees everything, is brilliant and unforgettable (“Apart from wild mushrooms, which are sometimes tricky to identify and occasionally poisonous, Doris thinks wild people are quite similar to wild food—likeable and interesting”). Her observations are key to understanding the rest of the town. For most of the book's length, the perspective pivots between Lulu's first-person narration and Doris' third-person point of view and follows the tale for five decades without being wed to a linear timeline. The reader is quickly drawn into the intimate details of the lives of the town's inhabitants, compassionately crafted and carefully doled out. From shame to sexual abuse to the undermentioned strain of motherhood, this debut novelist boldly takes on a lot. While the absent father is a tired archetype, a sympathetic story of an absent mother is rare.
This small-town drama is jam-packed with revelations and sweet portraits that stick.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77041-416-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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