An unfortunately bland sketch of addiction, millennial listlessness, and the redemptive quality of craftsmanship with some...
An opioid addict–turned–apprentice boat builder tries to find himself on the Northern California coast.
We meet 27-year-old “digital refugee” Eli “Berg” Koenigsberg at a low point in his life: After a concussion led to an opioid addiction, then rehab, he has moved to Talinas, a town on the Northern California coast, where he hopes to establish “a sober life”—instead he’s breaking into houses for drugs. But within pages, Berg cleans himself up—at least a little. He gets a job, manages to wean himself temporarily off pills, and then apprentices himself to Alejandro Vega, a boat builder who tells him things like “stop thinking about the result. Stop wanting [the work] to be over right away and I promise everything will go better.” Alejandro is “a genius,” his mind “borderless and kinetic,” and under his influence Berg learns not just to work with wood, but to “get outside of himself.” But will Alejandro’s healing influence be enough to combat the lurking urges of addiction? Gumbiner’s debut is an underachieving redemption tale, and its failures are familiar to that particular genus of didactic literature—namely: The difficulties from which the characters need redeeming feel like excuses for the author to show us how exactly redemption can be had. Gumbiner could have sidestepped this with detail, by diving deeply into his human subjects—but his novel, like its characters, aspires toward simplicity rather than complexity. The result is that everything—the problem, the solutions, the quirky Northern California vibe, even the potentially fascinating fact that Berg robbed Alejandro’s house before later becoming his apprentice—feels like a plot device, and thus unconvincing, one-dimensional, bland. There is the occasional arresting line; for example, the skin on an addict’s face looks like it has been “stretched tight and then stapled across his jawline.” But the book is mostly composed of apathetic sentences (a supporting character’s storytelling is “disjointed and difficult to follow, like an avant-garde novel”), vapid dialogue (“ ‘What’s up, Berg?…’ ‘Hi Kenneth…do you remember my girlfriend, Nell?’ ‘Hi,’ Nell said. ‘Oh hi,” Kenneth said”), and clichéd profundity (“the problem was he didn’t know what he wanted”).
An unfortunately bland sketch of addiction, millennial listlessness, and the redemptive quality of craftsmanship with some Northern California flare.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944211-55-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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