Stories of strength and ethical quandary, but inconsistently rendered.
A collection of stories about hard choices borne of desperation and the stark delineations between classes in both Guatemala and the United States.
Clearman (Todos Santos, 2010, etc.) opens her collection with the novella A Cup of Tears, an ethically fraught adoption tale, alternating among the perspectives of 15-year-old Concepción, wet nurse to a pair of twins; Prudencia, a baby contractor who acquires the toddlers; Doña Merced, who facilitates their adoption; and two American adoptive parents. For all, “this was a fight to survive,” Clearman writes. Concepción wants to escape north. Prudencia’s call to betray her own ethics comes as much from being “up against the knife” of the bill for her mother’s impending surgery as it does from carrying a metaphorical knife against her father and the shame of incest. Love, for Clearman’s characters, is dangerous and often wrong; in A Cup of Tears, particularly, babies are paradoxically the detritus of forbidden union and the emblems of audacious hope. Stories like “The Race” as well as stories like “Saints and Sinners” illustrate the polarity of life in Guatemala and the U.S. Guatemala represents tradition but also poverty and corruption. In America lies opportunity but instability. When Fausto Mendoza Ramirez returns home to prove himself in a grueling race, he must confront his father and his family legacy. Though characters in Clearman’s stories are genetically related, the collection is inconsistent in its ethical weight. The author offers the same photographic eye and acute vision of Guatemalan culture throughout, but the novella’s arresting implications are not echoed in stories like “Turista” or “Fathers and Sons.” Though these repeat the refrain that “the North was taking all our sons,” there is less at stake for these stories' characters, and the stories suffer for lack of the characteristic unease that drives A Cup of Tears.
Stories of strength and ethical quandary, but inconsistently rendered.Pub Date: March 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9968384-5-0
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Rain Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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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