The language is gorgeous, the tone exquisitely highbrow, but the result is disappointingly dull.
In parallel but unconnected narratives, Irish novelist Park (The Light of Amsterdam, 2012, etc.) portrays the inner lives of three women—two historic, one fictional—who have devoted themselves to their difficult husbands’ creative needs and ambitions.
The women’s stories follow the same pattern of early passion evolving into long years of travail and sacrifice. Aging widow Catherine Blake remembers her life with prophetic poet William Blake: his yearlong courtship filled with letters she was too illiterate to read; their romantic early marriage; a miscarriage followed by the threat of Blake’s passion for another woman (a not historically proven event); their three-year stay in Sussex, Blake inspired by seeing a tiger and a comet. Catherine revels in being William’s student, his assistant and his succor against a public that thought him more madman than genius. Unlike Blake, Osip Mandelstam was recognized as a genius in his lifetime, but writing poetry in Stalinist Russia was a political act, and his words were considered inflammatory. In 1939, Osip’s wife, Nadezhda, waits in line to send the exiled Osip a package before her story bounces forward and backward in time to earlier exiles and tribulations the couple shared and to the future in which Nadezhda must survive alone while preserving Osip’s banned writing. Like Catherine Blake, the childless Nadezhda dedicates her life to supporting her husband’s genius, acting as his scribe and suffering his infidelities as minor irritants. Fictional Lydia is the new widow of Don, a contemporary Irish poet who never achieved greatness before his fatal heart attack at their seaside cottage. Unhappily married for years, Lydia remains ambivalent toward Don as husband and poet. He was a womanizer and an uninvolved, resentful father to their son and two daughters. Now Lydia gathers with her adult daughters to spread Don’s ashes and deal with the maternal grief she had never been able to articulate over her son, who died years before.
The language is gorgeous, the tone exquisitely highbrow, but the result is disappointingly dull.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-524-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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