The last two novels of French writer Bove (The Stepson, 1994, etc.), contemporary and friend of Gide and Beckett, evoke in stunning, characteristically minimalist prose the plight of an intellectual antihero forced to act by war. Published separately after Bove's death in 1945, these final works of his career have an interconnected plot as well as the same narrator/protagonist: RenÇ de Talhouet, a French soldier on the run. Together, they describe the acts and attitudes that will culminate in Talhouet's eventual choice of the only liberty possible for a man of his sensibilities. In Night Departure, RenÇ, a German prisoner of war, persuades a group of his French fellows to escape. But RenÇ kills two German guards, and though the prisoners escape, their long walk through Germany is shadowed by knowledge of the retribution that awaits them if captured. Cowardly, prickly, and sensitive to the point of paranoia, RenÇ is obsessively and increasingly fearful and suspicious. He can't sleep because he fears the comrade on watch will be negligent, and he often goes hungry because he mistrusts the local peasants' help. After an arduous journey, he reaches Paris, but No Place suggests that freedom in occupied France is as elusive as in a German camp. RenÇ stays with friends and relations but never feels safe. His fears, as he himself observes, are not only real but existential: ``...the problem with thinking too much is that in the end you never do anything and you always look suspicious.'' Finally, he's caught, imprisoned, then released, but it's too late: Freedom is not possible in France, and so RenÇ flees to Spain, where certain imprisonment and death await. A masterful, always understated, portrait of a man as much imprisoned by his own inner demons as by circumstances. And a reminder of how tragic Bove's early death was.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-941423-91-3
Page Count: 467
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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