One of a kind. Deserves a big splash and lots of readers.
An international art star becomes a dog walker after 25 harsh years in federal prison.
This funny, edgy, and winning novel introduces an extraordinary narrator who reveals her back story slowly and tantalizingly, so spoilers must be avoided here. Her name is Carleen Kepper, but it used to be Ester Rosenthal. It was changed by the woman who admitted her into the prison system to serve her life sentence because “They’ll kill you within a day and a half for crucifying their Lord.” For reasons that will be revealed, Carleen has been paroled and is living in a halfway house in New York City. She works as a dog walker and trainer, an occupation at which she is uniquely gifted. She is also trying to gain access to her 11-year-old daughter, a precocious girl who has changed her name from Pony to Batya Shulamite and is preparing for her bat mitzvah. How can she have a child that age if she was in prison since she was 18? Can’t tell you. What can be said is that Ester Rosenthal was an art prodigy who made the cover of the New York Times Magazine at the age of 12 and whose paintings sell for more than $100,000, and it is kleptomania and prankery that got way out of hand that led to her incarceration. Among many great things about this book, each of its many dogs practically leaps off the page. Carleen on black standard poodles: “They demand constant, unequivocal love and will leap into your lap as if they were toy versions of themselves and are insulted when ordered to get off. They learn their commands instantly, but not because they are particularly smart. They’re more like teenage boys who joined the army too soon and will do any discipline just to prove they can do it.” Swados (My Depression: A Picture Book, 2005, etc.), a respected playwright, died at 64 just after finishing this novel.
One of a kind. Deserves a big splash and lots of readers.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55861-921-0
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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
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