Some of the material might have generated laughs as a five-minute Saturday Night Life “wild and crazy guys” sketch, but it...
Stylistic bravura can’t sustain interest in this overextended narrative with an underdeveloped plot.
Consider this the sophomore slump for the Pierre, whose debut novel, Vernon God Little (2003), won Britain’s Man Booker Prize despite polarized critical response. Here, Pierre continues to display a subversive delight in the possibilities of language (from titillation to disgust), but the corrosive vitality of its dialogue is about all this story has going for it. There are two plots, with thousands of miles between them, which the reader hopes will attain greater significance once they inevitably converge. Against a backdrop of terrorism in London, one story concerns the first successful surgical separation of conjoined twins, 33-year-old brothers named Bunny and Blair (not the most subtle of political references). Bunny is the brains of the two (and never thinks about sex), while Blair is the life force (who thinks of nothing but sex). If only one can survive, there’s some question as to which is the host and which is the parasite. The second plot features the titular Ludmila, trying to escape with her boyfriend from the war-torn Caucasus. Her major assets are her breasts (though this isn’t the word Pierre’s characters use) and her rudimentary command of English. After her incestuous grandfather dies while attempting to rape her, leaving her family in dire financial straits, she reluctantly becomes involved in a Russian mail-order-bride racket, thus sparking a visit to Russia by Blair (and Bunny). Perhaps the “Broken English” of the title refers to the twins as well as to Ludmila’s language skills. Perhaps not. Nothing else in this stick-figured, incongruously plotted, gratuitously indulgent novel seems to mean much, so why should that? If this is meant to be a send-up of globalization (or anything else), it misses the mark.
Some of the material might have generated laughs as a five-minute Saturday Night Life “wild and crazy guys” sketch, but it quickly wears thin as a novel.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-06237-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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