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THE GREAT INLAND SEA

Spare prose, startling images and an emotional landscape as harsh as the setting.

A bleak coming-of-age debut set in 1940s New South Wales.

Narrator Day, the son of a Viennese Jewish soprano and a rough monosyllabic Scotsman, is 12 when he witnesses his father, Darwin, tying and gagging his mother in bed each night. His mother had been in declining mental health for several years, since a miscarriage and her discovery that her husband was having an affair with Lelonie, a woman who lives and works on their ranch. Then one night, Day sees his father bury his mother in the red sand on the rise by the billabong. She has suffocated. Day runs away, first to the mud brick hut of Leonie, who takes him in overnight (hiding under her bed when his father appears, he finds himself the unwilling witness to their lovemaking). Then he heads to Melbourne, gets a job working with horses and dreams of being a jockey. At 18, he is shipped to a horse farm in Maryland, along with a racehorse named Unusual. He works hard, meets a girl by the name Callie, who also wants to be a jockey, and is drawn into a nocturnal game in which Callie, her groom and he take bets and run races for money. Day is haunted by memories of his mother and of Dickie, the man she seemed attracted to (and who may be his father). Meanwhile, Callie takes off, and Day finds her only six months later, but it seems she’s with another man. He moves to L.A., trains horses, then heads back to Australia, confronts his father and learns some family secrets. Callie sends for him to ride in a race in Mexico, and together they track down Dickie in Santa Barbara. This odd threesome heads down to Australia when Darwin has a stroke. With all the players in one place, Day learns how far he can trust Callie, Dickie and Darwin.

Spare prose, startling images and an emotional landscape as harsh as the setting.

Pub Date: May 10, 2005

ISBN: 1-59692-116-1

Page Count: 258

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005

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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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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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