Fiction as documentary, a coruscating, heartrending fable of struggle and loss.
Two 1970s activists spend decades on the run in Spiotta’s antihero odyssey.
With her second novel, Spiotta (Lightning Field, 2001) shows what riches can be gleaned from an approach that could at first blush seem overly mannered. Her protagonists, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker, appear only briefly as their true selves—passionate radicals in the Weather Underground vein, second-tier behind the likes of Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn—and then mostly only at the very end, in a bitter coda that reveals how their activism took a tragic turn. At the start of the book, Mary is already in hiding, under instructions from Bobby to choose a new identity. Spiotta follows Mary through the years as she moves from one community to the next, the heat always on her back, a kind and conscientious woman just a couple loaves of bread shy of being a full-on earth mother. Alternating chapters are set in the late ’90s, when Bobby (now known as Nash) works at an alternative Seattle bookstore and organizes protest groups in the back room. Bobby is the story’s brain, a sharp intellect chipping away at the corporate-government edifice, dreaming of being a heroic artist working on “your lifelong project, monument, statement. Your unyielding testament to, uh . . . well, unyielding.” Mary, then, is the heart—the kind but saddened eternal vagabond. It’s an unwelcome gender cliché in a book mostly void of such things. Spiotta fills in the spaces between the two fugitives with a wealth of detail and scintillating secondary characters, elucidating the vast gulf between the alternative cultures of the ’70s and ’90s, as well as the elements that bind them.
Fiction as documentary, a coruscating, heartrending fable of struggle and loss.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7298-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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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