Facile treatment of a difficult subject.
Glib exploration of international adoption.
Shelley and Martin run a funeral home in the South, but they are an affable, even a life-affirming pair. They have a comfortable marriage, a wide circle of friends and a tender, respectful relationship. Martin has two grown sons from a previous marriage, and despite Shelley’s affection for them, she wants a baby of her own. The book opens just as Shelley and Martin discover that the international adoption they have been waiting for has fallen through, an event that prompts Martin to change his mind about the whole business. When Shelley gets a call about a Vietnamese boy who is ready to be adopted, Martin refuses to help his wife and moves out of the house. Shelley, a buoyant character even when she is grieving, gives herself a crash course in Vietnamese culture, befriending Xuan Mai, the owner of a local Asian food store. Although Shelley’s ham-handed attempts to bond with an authentic Vietnamese person annoy her, Mai travels to Vietnam with Shelley to help her with the baby. Here, though, the novel breaks down, for Vietnam simultaneously provokes and redresses all of the characters’ most deeply felt traumas. Martin served in Vietnam during the war, and fears revisiting his bleakest emotional crises. Mai did something horrible to her family, and fled Vietnam, never to return. Shelley, of course, finds in Vietnam the very child for whom she is willing to sacrifice her family. The novel is very earnest, and it weaves together these plots very carefully. But there is something in the breezy tone of the book that ignores the messy, unpredictable sequence of cause and effect that it seems to wish to explore in the first place. By the time the various plots are all sewn up—unsurprisingly, every crisis has a pat solution—the book has veered dangerously close to fatuousness.
Facile treatment of a difficult subject.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-113048-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
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