Too slack for satire.
An attempt at parody in the form of a memoir, from Puerto Rico native Yunqué (Blood Fugues, 2005, etc.).
Rebecca Horowitz has a mother she describes as a “genetic fruit salad,” a Jewish father and no sense of cultural identity. She begins to discover the first stirrings of a self—a rather depraved self—as she falls for Latin lothario Charlie Maisonet, and, when her lover’s mother suggests that she become Puerto Rican, Rebecca is open to the idea. Soon, this Park Slope social worker is a stripper named Zoraida Delgado. The narrator of this faux memoir states that she doesn’t want the story of her transformation to be confused with chick lit. There’s little chance of that happening. Although her tale does conclude with an ostensibly happy union, few heroines of romantic comedy have happy endings with boyfriends who ask them to perform carnal acts with a dog. As it plumbs the depths of degradation before it soars to a self-actualizing close, the narrative resembles the type of autobiography deplored by Rebecca/Zoraida’s mentor—the novelist Edgardo Vega Yunqué. In this type of autobiography, an underprivileged protagonist overcomes the grim adversity presented by his race and economic status, but only after offering a lurid portrait of said adversity. This, then, is satire, and the author really doesn’t want anyone to miss it. Yunqué allows his protégé to paraphrase him liberally as he lambasts the literary establishment and decries the ghettoizing of “ethnic” art, and he has some valid points to make about the cult of the memoir and the dynamic of excluding non-normative voices by celebrating their otherness. But satire requires tension and speed, which this novel lacks. The narrative moves at a glacial pace, and the increasingly bored reader has ample time to reflect not only on the absurdity of the phenomena that Yunqué parodies, but also on the absurdity of what he has written.
Too slack for satire.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-064-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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