Stylishly written, cleverly observed, and boldly imagined.
After his academic job search, his journalistic career, and his marriage proposal go down in flames, an angry young man moves into his mother's basement and starts a radical movement that pits millennials against baby boomers.
Cassie and Mark, both bluegrass musicians, meet at a gig in Williamsburg, where "maybe fifty bespectacled recent college grads milled around drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from the can and Miller High Life from the bottle." Cassie reflexively rebuffs Mark's friendly overtures, fearing that her girlfriend will notice and take umbrage. (Perhaps girlfriend is not the right word. "They lived together in a kind of Heiddegarian phenomenological relationship present, in which only the present moment of drinking or playing music or fucking existed, an immediate Dasein of mutually undecided and uncommented-upon cathexis, Eros and lust.") Despite Cassie's lack of enthusiasm, the two soon find themselves in a band, a relationship, and a shared apartment. But shortly after Mark gets her a fact-checking gig at the glossy magazine where he's on staff, their lives take starkly different turns. He loses his job, spends a year writing an essay on Emma Goldman that no one reads, then makes a financial and romantic mistake so serious he is forced to move home to Baltimore. There, he puts on a David Crosby mask, sets himself up in front of an upside-down poster of Jerry Garcia, and begins to issue YouTube screeds against baby boomers. His message: Retire now, greedy pigs, and free up the jobs for us. The videos go viral. Cassie, meanwhile, is riding a wave of good luck. She's become Director of Research at a new media company called RazorWire and is having a passionate relationship with a brilliant female co-worker. The money is fantastic even if the job is something less than that, fact-checking articles like "Seventeen Great New Recipes That Use Splenda Instead of Sugar." But when Mark, now known as Boomer1, loses control of his movement, bad things start to happen, first to Bob Weir, Eddie Bauer, Jann Wenner, and the AARP. Torday's (The Last Flight of Poxl West, 2015) gifts as a writer are brilliantly displayed in the details of Cassie's and Mark's inner and outer worlds. A third main character, Mark's mother, is not as compelling, and when this ambitious social novel comes to rest with her, it loses some steam.
Stylishly written, cleverly observed, and boldly imagined.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-19179-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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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