A paean to friendship and the resilience of the human spirit.
A moving journey through grief, loss, war, and new beginnings for three childhood friends on the cusp of finally growing up.
Irish debut novelist Sheehan packs an emotional gut punch in his new book, as well as a fair number of laughs—a tightrope walk to be sure, but one he handles with aplomb. The story is set in the mid-1990s and concerns the efforts of Karl and Baz, two friends, to help their friend Tom, a failed war correspondent–turned–relief worker, who returns to their native Dublin from the Bosnian War a shellshocked ghost of his former self. Karl and Baz convince Tom to accompany them to an experimental treatment facility for PTSD in Northern California, a last-ditch effort to restore some semblance of a normal life for him. The novel alternates between Karl’s first-person narrative (which shifts between laugh-out-loud schoolboy humor and heartbreaking pathos, often in the same breath) and Tom’s sober, journalistic account of his time in Sarajevo, of atrocities witnessed, of friends made and lost. As such, the novel reads as part buddy road movie, part harrowing war movie, switching between hijinks and horror. Hovering above the entire narrative is the memory of Karl’s foster brother, Gabriel, who committed suicide not long before the book begins, an albatross of grief and regret hanging around the characters’ necks. The novel reads like a long, slow reveal—several of the most dramatic events that give the story its heft show up in the first few pages, but the hows and whys are slowly doled out over the course of the rest of the book, and this keeps the reader involved. Certain events in the third act may be a bit too far-fetched for some, but they serve the story well; with the depth of character on display here, a few plot points do not affect the emotional impact of the conclusion.
A paean to friendship and the resilience of the human spirit.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63246-066-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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