Pinckney’s discursive novel, coming across as if it were a late-20th-century hipster version of Rilke’s The Notebooks of...
He’s black. He’s gay. He’s a recovering substance abuser. And he’s running around Berlin during the 1980s. For the most part, Pinckney's novel succeeds at being as intriguing as its premise.
His name is Jed and, like the protagonist of Pinckney’s 1992 debut, High Cotton, he's a young, ferociously intelligent product of an accomplished African-American family based in the Midwest; in this case, Chicago, where he finds himself constricted and chafing. Restless for adventure and reinvention, Jed seeks both in West Berlin during the final decade of its walled-off existence. Invoking the name of Christopher Isherwood, he declares at the start that gay sex, even with the advent of AIDS, is what beckons him to Germany. “Berlin,” he says, “meant white boys who wanted to atone for Germany’s crimes by loving a black boy like me.” He spends several summers in Germany, staying with his cousin Cello, an imposing, imperious classical pianist. By the time he decides to stay there for good, Jed has gone into rehab and fights off temptations to reacquaint himself with white wine and designer drugs. At one point in his odyssey, he works as a writer for a celebrated architect whose ambitious proposals to rehabilitate whole sections of Berlin mirror Jed’s own attempt to forge a bold new identity. Meanwhile, he seeks out Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with black soldiers; engages with the burgeoning, multicultural nightlife in seedy, neo-bohemian bars; falls in and out of love, sometimes requited, sometimes not. Those looking for a straightforward narrative path toward self-discovery will not find it here. The story shifts back and forth from Chicago to Berlin, from Jed’s adolescence to adulthood. What sustains your attention throughout these sometimes-disorienting transitions is Pinckney’s dolefully witty and incisively observant voice, whether describing the quirks of his hero’s family (“When the going gets rough, make pancakes,” Jed’s father advises) or evoking the sights, sounds, and even smells of West Berlin, “the involuntary island, that petri dish of romantic radicalism.”
Pinckney’s discursive novel, coming across as if it were a late-20th-century hipster version of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Marte Laurids Brigge, typifies an era in which inventive, idiosyncratic styles flourish anew in African-American writing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-11381-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
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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PERSPECTIVES
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