From the author of Exposed (1994), etc.: another tense, slightly out-of-focus personal drama, but this one runs on too long, its effect dissipated by its own relentless intensity. Erin Haley is a popular newscaster in Reading, Penn., who suddenly has an on-air breakdown. She takes a leave of absence to go back to San Diego, where, ten years earlier, she believes that she was raped—or that maybe she raped someone. What she does remember is that she wound up in the hospital afterwards with a broken jaw, and that the man who might have beaten her up is possibly the man who was involved in the rape. In San Diego, Erin retrieves her journals from that time, entries written mainly at a radio station where the fresh-faced college grad had begun as a writer and researcher for a morning on-air team consisting of a sexist, insecure older hack and a talented ex-jock who had also been recently hired by the station. Mazza alternates the ten-year- old journal entries with an ongoing open letter to Kyle, the ex- jock who was somehow involved in the decade-old brutality. The piecemeal journal entries yield clues to what happened, while in the open letter Erin describes a healing affair she's currently having with a married man. This affair frees her to push through and remember what really happened and to go on with her life. Meanwhile, unfortunately, Mazza's precise, clear prose is often at odds with her heroine's chronic uncertainty: ``Half the time I'm not sure what I was talking about in this notebook...'' a typical journal entry begins. And the endless soul-searching grows stale quickly, making what could have been a tight, tense short story seem like an indulgent and unfocused novel. A few well-crafted and moving moments, then, but ultimately tedious and grating.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56689-031-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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