The best moments of this good though certainly dispiriting book are those in which we sense that better things await the...
“We are always playing roles and there is a certain truth to masks”: an absorbing but sobering roman à clef by philosopher/novelist Louis and a sharply pointed coming-of-age tale.
Kenneth Rexroth, the American poet, published a memoir that bore the title An Autobiographical Novel, he said, at the insistence of the lawyers. No one save for Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992, can say for sure where novel begins and memoir ends here; the book reads like autobiography unadorned except for occasional dark-lyrical moments, as with the anti-Proustian opening sentence: “From my childhood I have no happy memories.” It’s abundantly evident, just a few pages in, why Louis should make such a declaration, for though he lives in la belle France, it’s in the nearly Appalachian countryside of Picardy, where a gay kid such as himself is a playground victim from the get-go. His father, who—shudder—drinks box wine, box after box, is a raging brute descended from other raging brutes, wants nothing more than to toughen up a boy who won't be toughened. Mom is, like a sans-culotte, “torn between absolute submission to power and an enduring sense of revolt.” She smokes like a chimney, aware that it’s no good for her but seemingly unconcerned that her asthmatic son might be suffering. Eddy is smart and obliging, even though “being an obedient student at school was considered girlish,” and nobody out in the sticks can figure him out except to peg him as “Bellegueule, the homo.” Throughout, he grapples with that identity, determined to make himself manly, attempting to convince himself, “Maybe I’m not gay…maybe I’ve just always had a bourgeois body that was trapped in the world of my childhood.” And on the other side of that struggle, self-discovery awaits, patiently….
The best moments of this good though certainly dispiriting book are those in which we sense that better things await the protagonist in a world far beyond his window.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-26665-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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