Wild, weird, and wonderful. Harington should send a copy to Al Gore—then disconnect his phone.
If Robert Penn Warren had ever been turned on to hallucinogens, he might have produced something like this fantasy of a mad southern autodidact who runs for governor of Arkansas and finds just enough lunatics to bring him to the threshold of victory.
Real-life characters (the author among them) are mixed into this stew of fiction and fact, which simmers at a nice slow pace in Harington’s roundabout narration. We start from the little Ozark hamlet of Stay More (When Angels Rest, 1998, etc.), home to the polymath pig-farmer Vernon Inglenook. Made rich at an early age by the razorback hogs his family for generations has turned into the succulent Inglenook Hams, Vernon has been able to devote the better part of his life (i.e., the afternoon and evening parts, once the hogs had been slopped) to a systematic program of self-education. Moving from A to Z, he had already mastered art, chess, finance, medicine, and oceanography by the time he reached politics. Not content with skimming Locke and Hobbes, he decided to test their theories by running for governor against the odious incumbent, Shoat Bradfield. Although he has no political experience and quite a few political liabilities (not the least being a common-law marriage to his first cousin Jelena Inglenook), Vernon puts together a first-rate campaign team (known to the press corps as “The Seven Samurai”) that manages by hook and crook to bulldoze him through the primaries and to the Democratic nomination. Vowing to “extirpate” handguns, tobacco, prisons, schools, and hospitals from the state if elected, Vernon presents one of the strangest campaign platforms ever seen. Are there enough madmen—even in Arkansas—to get him into office? Let’s just say that it all comes down to absentee ballots in the end.
Wild, weird, and wonderful. Harington should send a copy to Al Gore—then disconnect his phone.Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6855-4
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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