A remarkable debut novel describing a young man’s coming of age amid the biker gangs of Oakland during the late 1960s. Single mothers are always going to have their hands full, but T-Bird Murphy’s mom knows where to turn for help: the Hell’s Angels. Ever since her husband’s been in jail, she’s dated a biker, so she can rely on the Angels to pitch in whenever there’s a crisis—and she gets more than her share. T-Bird himself seems to move from scrape to scrape, fighting off the blacks and Mexicans who mock his bookishness at school and ambush him almost nightly as he walks home. When T-Bird’s convict father gets paroled, however, Mom panics and persuades the Angels to help her leave the scene before he arrives. T-Bird stays on. He and his old man move to a trailer behind the gas station where they work, and for the first time ever, T-Bird savors the semblance of a normal family life. From his father he learns how to fight (—There’s no such thing as a fair fight. . . . Someone always wins, and someone always loses. It’s stupid to be the loser—), and soon the Mexicans regard him with a newfound respect. But by and by his old man turns increasingly violent and irrational, and T-Bird sets out on his own, working construction crews by day and playing trumpet in Bay Area bars by night. Brawling remains a part of existence, and T-Bird becomes an old hand at gang alliances and fights. The real miracle of his adolescence, however, is not merely that he survives, but that he flourishes—and emerges as an articulate, ambitious man. Refreshingly sincere and unaffected, Williamson’s chronicle provides a fascinating glimpse, from the inside, of a world that is rarely visible—and a marvelous account of one boy’s escape from it. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19861-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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