Disorganized in a way that’s intended to be appealing, though its combination of humanity and idea never quite melds.
Short moral debut novel about one man’s jaunts through an anti-Pittsburgh so close to an underground that it feels futuristic.
Ray has eschewed the academic set for a more focused and intimate association with real life: he helps clients from a Blind Center learn to use the bus system to get around in a cautionary urbanscape, as if he were “a transgender Dorothy leading his benighted band through this Oz of mundane reality.” As we move through this hectic, bleary world, we also move through Ray’s life, visiting his mother, hearing of his ex-wife, Arlene, occupying a kind of alter-city based on bus schedules and the unique topography of Pittsburgh, PA. Although the story begins on this interesting terrain, it soon executes a bus’s awkward three-point turn back to familiar territory: the adventures of writing instructors at the University of Pittsburgh, where Walton (stories: Waiting in Line, not reviewed) teaches. This puts it into the same category as Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and, less directly, Chuck Kinder’s Honeymooners, though it isn’t quite as successful as either. Ray is soon attending parties of Pitt writing instructors, engaging in random sexual encounters with ex-colleagues of his ex-wife, having adventures not quite in keeping with what seemed to have gotten the book’s bus rolling in the first place. The vision is admirable, but Ray’s near obsession with bus schedules and routine stands in stark contrast to the overall structure of the narrative, whose ride is far more runaway and frenetic. The many references to Pittsburgh may become tiresome—unrecognizable to some, and an already-mined wellspring to others—but the final message is genuine: “ . . . all our journeys are chancy, but the intention to do good, like the intention to sin, is equal to the deed.”
Disorganized in a way that’s intended to be appealing, though its combination of humanity and idea never quite melds.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2002
ISBN: 0-88748-377-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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