Sneed should be applauded for not diving headlong into salaciousness, which her subject matter could invite. But her touch...
A mild meditation on art and relationships by the author of Little Known Facts (2013).
A talented painter, Jayne Marks lacks the confidence to pursue her art and has instead been slogging through two unfulfilling jobs in the years since college to pay rent on her crappy Manhattan apartment, prompting the question: why not move to an outer borough like all the other young people and artists? She seems resigned to her fate until she starts a romance with Laurent Moller, an older French man and the successful owner of art galleries in Paris and New York, who, after dating Jayne for five months, invites her to move to Paris to be his live-in girlfriend and benefactee. She accepts. Paris, of course, presents a host of social hurdles in the form of Laurent’s lecherous business partner, his judgmental ex-wife, and his chilly grown daughter. Jayne is insecure and wishy-washy about all her relationships and confused about Laurent’s insistence that they retain privacy about what they're doing when they're not together. Is that where her own infidelity starts, or is it her natural reluctance to say what she wants, combined with the small flame she keeps burning for an ex? Laurent, in a passage written from his perspective, adds gusto to the proceedings but not much in the way of illumination. Bigger questions about being kept, mixing business and pleasure, and the creative process go mostly unexamined. Oft-mentioned details that should add depth to the characters—that Laurent’s family is in the wine business or that Jayne spent time in Washington D.C., before moving to New York—have little apparent importance to their personalities or lives.
Sneed should be applauded for not diving headlong into salaciousness, which her subject matter could invite. But her touch is so light that the issues at stake feel inconsequential.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-692-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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