Only the vivid portraits of presanitized, pregentrified New York neighborhoods offer some relief from the sour monotony of...
In actor/playwright Bogosian’s third novel (Wasted Beauty, 2005, etc.), a successful middle-aged author finds another writer just as egotistical: himself, many years younger.
Richard Morris is single, childless and lecherous. The 56-year-old Jewish novelist lives to write, make money and bed pretty girls. Richard the lover belongs to the wham-bam school; as a thank-you, the lucky lady might get an autographed copy of his latest book (his fifth is just out). Recovering from heart surgery in his Connecticut country house in 2006, Richard stumbles on journals he’d written 30 years ago; the narrative from that point on alternates between the journal entries of Richard the Elder and the Younger. The latter is getting his bearings in New York. He shares a Manhattan apartment with an Israeli and a sexy Polish poet working at a real-estate agency. Richard makes a living answering phones at a video-art company in SoHo—still an actual artists’ colony in the 1970s—but he lives to get wasted, get laid and write up a storm, secretly taping his encounters to use as material for his stories. (Never trust a writer.) This will get him into trouble with Big John, a freaky pot dealer who generously shares his encyclopedic knowledge in his Williamsburg loft. Though Richard the Elder claims to be embarrassed by the excesses of his young self, all that really separates them is the beginner’s boundless energy. Both men are self-pitying, self-involved loners, and a little of this goes a long way, as Bogosian relentlessly hammers home his point. While his previous novels showcased a range of characters, here Richard sucks up all the oxygen. The revelations pile up; the self-portrait darkens to include a conveniently forgotten rape. At the end, Richard tracks down Big John, now a schizo in a nut house, and messes with his old lady and their son. It’s a gratuitous twist of the knife.
Only the vivid portraits of presanitized, pregentrified New York neighborhoods offer some relief from the sour monotony of the two Richards’ escapades.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3409-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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