A surfeit of elitist sensitivity undermines the novel’s genuine intelligence and sensory delights.
At the center of Winthrop’s latest (Fireworks, 2006), which concerns a Manhattan family in crisis, is an abnormally sensitive, artistic and bright 11-year-old girl who has not spoken a word in nine months.
Isabelle’s parents, Wilson and Ruth, are at their wits’ end as the month of December begins. The psychologists to whom they’ve sent their daughter Isabelle have not been able to diagnose the cause of her silence. Wilson and Ruth spend their days, whether in their spacious city apartment or cozy weekend cottage, obsessed with Isabelle’s condition. Ruth, who feels she’s failed as a mother, has closed her law practice to care for Isabelle, while Wilson, an unusually devoted husband and father, displays the kind of patience found only in fiction. Despite small quirks the two are almost too perfect to generate empathy, but they are believably distraught when the principal of Isabelle’s private school, which she has not physically attended since she stopped talking the previous February, decrees that Isabelle must return. Ruth fixates on Isabelle’s art as the key to curing her while Wilson obsesses about a family trip to Africa. Meanwhile, Isabelle draws with precocious talent, secretly learns to play Beethoven on the piano and observes her parents with a mixture of anger and love. Isabelle’s relationship to speech is like an anorexic’s toward food—and actually food looms large in her unspoken yearnings. As Christmas approaches, tensions in the household mount. Isabelle’s beloved dog is diagnosed with cancer. Ruth shows Isabelle’s drawings to her shrink without permission. Ruth’s problematic, possibly schizophrenic brother visits. After the careful, delicately calibrated accretion of detail about Isabelle and her parents, the ending feels disappointingly manufactured and a bit sentimental. Winthrop, who grew up in New York before attending Harvard, where she graduated in 2001, displays an intimate, sometimes excruciatingly obsessive understanding of Isabelle’s privileged Manhattan upbringing.
A surfeit of elitist sensitivity undermines the novel’s genuine intelligence and sensory delights.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26830-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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