These generic short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, and other magazines. Long (The Flood of '64, 1987) occasionally hits on an interesting idea, but he has a mild touch and never goes for the jugular, which results in a uniform softness. Marly Wilcox has an ``Attraction'' for Charlie Bitterman, and becomes entangled in a triangle with him and his racy high-school sweetheart, whose eye was gouged out by an older lover's daughter. There are some good observations about small towns and what it means to leave them or stay put, but the story peters out. In ``Perfection,'' a teenage girl plans to spend the night with her football-player boyfriend for the first time while her father is out of town, but her plans are complicated when she witnesses violence. Again, Long skirts the edges of meaning, retreating into a vague parallelism. Adult relationships are no more solid, and often end with banal twists, in the style of a slightly modernized O. Henry. In ``Talons,'' the narrator's aunt dies unexpectedly, and then he and his wife discover a cache of letters from an unknown man. When the narrator visits in order to inform the man of his aunt's death, he finds that the man is married and keeps a portrait of his aunt at home with the excuse that a customer left it at his frame shop and never picked it up. In ``Real Estate,'' Rosemary is renting a house from her boss, Gil, who also sleeps with her occasionally, although Rosemary tries to conceal their relationship from her teenage daughter. In the end, Gil's snotty girlfriend, a real estate agent, drops by to let Rosemary know that the house is on the market. There are plenty of recurring motifs here (surprise discoveries following death, hard-hearted daughters), but they add up to repetition rather than thematic depth. Fuzzy vignettes with few surprises.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80033-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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