A career-making book that bears interesting comparison with both Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998) and Michael...
McCracken just may strike it rich with this enchantingly detailed and immensely appealing follow-up to the NBA-nominated The Giant’s House (1996).
Mose Sharp, half of the celebrated comedy team Carter and Sharp, tells their story 30 years after his estrangement from his partner Rocky Carter. McCracken has researched widely and well, and the story offers a delicious panorama of the American entertainment industry throughout the 20th century, as Mose, “a nice Jewish boy from Iowa who stumbled from one act to another,” relates his experiences first as a nondescript vaudevillian and then as straight man to the ebullient Rocky. Visions of Abbott and Costello and/or Laurel and Hardy dance through the reader’s head as the novel moves both backward and forward. We learn the roots of Mose’s motivation in his relationship with his older sister (and mentor) Hattie, their five other sisters, and their stoical widowed father; we follow the team’s upward mobility through the Midwest’s vaudeville circuit, on radio (Rudy Vallee’s show, then their own), in Hollywood, and eventually on television. Rocky goes through four wives, while Mose marries beautiful dance instructor Jessica Howard, fathers four children (three of whom survive), and ends the partnership when a justifiably aggrieved Rocky makes a damaging threat. The elegiac final 50 pages chronicle Rocky’s inexplicable disappearance, Mose’s continuing career as a movie character actor, and a wonderfully written halfhearted reconciliation attempt that takes place in, of all places, Reno, Nevada. The show-biz atmosphere is re-created with great skill. The comic routines McCracken devises for her protagonists (one of which provides her superb title) are suitably dated and groan-worthy, and the juxtapositions of Rocky’s and Mose’s gaudy public images with the scruffy realities of their private lives are charted with masterly precision and empathy. And what a movie this will make (there’s a killer part for Nathan Lane).
A career-making book that bears interesting comparison with both Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998) and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). This one is going places.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-31837-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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