Caveats often accompany reviews of Cooper's work (Frisk, Wrong, etc.), and it's not hard to see why. His novels (including this one) depict a nasty, brutish kind of gay sex, shadowed by violence and exploitation, yet they also have an inescapable power. We're in California, though you'd never know it; nearly all the scenes are interiors. Ziggy McCauley is a dysfunctional 18- year-old who checks into his high school just long enough to see his therapist. When Ziggy was two he was adopted by two gay fathers. After a while Roger, the ``less evil'' one, split; the other, Brice, has been raping and beating up his son for years. Ziggy, bisexual and ``needy,'' has one friend, Calhoun, ``the only human being...who definitely gives a half-shit about him.'' The problem is that Calhoun is both straight and a heroin addict who likes to keep the world at a distance, so Ziggy must keep his expressions of love to a minimum while simultaneously dealing with Roger, who has flown in from New York for some hot sex. Another sinister influence is Ziggy's Uncle Ken, who makes porn videos starring young teens; when 13-year-old Robin OD's, Ken summons a necrophile and collects a finder's fee before burying the corpse. Here, Cooper goes over the top; more chilling is the moment when Roger and Brice snare Ziggy, befouled by vomit, spaced-out on heroin, and do ``every lascivious thing you can do to a putrid and comatose male.'' Though Cooper's adults are beyond redemption, his kids achieve a genuine pathos, for despite their best efforts they never stop feeling; at the end Ziggy and Calhoun snuggle up together like babes in the woods. There is no narrative momentum in what is essentially a tableau of victims and predators; even so, the power is there.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8021-1542-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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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