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THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING 2004

A mixed bunch, a little below last year’s standard. (Not seen: pieces by Jon Gertner, Paula Peterson, and David Sedaris.)

The third in this catchall series is weighted toward fiction and has an international flavor.

Included are two cartoons and four nonfiction pieces: David Mamet’s notes on language, “Secret Names,” suggestive but in need of shaping; Michael Hall’s “Running For His Life,” a stirring tribute to an ethnic cleansing survivor from Burundi, now an ace runner/coach in Texas; Michael Paterniti’s workmanlike account of an Iranian living in a Paris airport for 15 years (“The Fifteen-Year Layover”); and Transmissions From Camp Trans, Michelle Tea’s long examination of prejudice against transsexuals among feminists that gets bogged down in its convoluted sexual politics. The fiction has more of a sheen, including three very strong stories with foreign settings. “Half of a Yellow Sun,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a heartbreaking evocation of the 1960s rise and fall of Biafra; Daniel Alarcón’s “City of Clowns” provides a memorable portrait of turbulent family life in Lima, Peru; and Gina Ochsner’s “Hidden Lives of Lakes” is a sweet fantasy about the allure of the afterlife for some ordinary Russians. Looking for something quintessentially American? Try the always-dependable Christopher Buckley’s “We Have a Pope!” (a juicy account of a p.r. campaign for an American pope), or Lance Olsen’s “Sixteen Jackies”: far away from the tabloid versions of Jackie Kennedy, the one true Jackie, all 246 pounds of her, is kicking back in her Caribbean hideaway. Some editorial judgments are puzzling. Why include Thom Jones’s ho-hum study of craziness (“Night Train”) when you already have the brilliant and terrifying portrayal of a father’s madness infecting his son (Ben Ehrenreich’s “What You Eat”)? And we don’t need both John Haskell’s “Good World” and Tom Kealey’s “Bones,” experimental offerings with similar structures. With family life, however, the range is impressive, from tight-knit Orthodox Jews (Julie Orringer’s “The Smoothest Way is Full Of Stones”) to the failed family that sells its babies (“The Promise of Something,” by Cheryl Printup).

A mixed bunch, a little below last year’s standard. (Not seen: pieces by Jon Gertner, Paula Peterson, and David Sedaris.)

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2004

ISBN: 0-618-34122-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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