So robust and resilient are Bauermeister’s characters that readers may wish she had challenged them with thornier dilemmas.
A Seattle chef and her circle of friends cope with life’s pivotal moments.
In this follow-up to The School of Essential Ingredients (2009), Chef Lillian continues to run her small restaurant, which has become a hub for people in transition. In what is essentially a collection of linked stories, the following characters have their say: Al, Lillian's accountant; her sous-chef, Chloe; Isabelle, an elderly woman with whom Chloe is staying; the lanky and taciturn dishwasher, Finnegan; Louise, Al's tightly wound wife; Lillian’s new boyfriend, widower Tom; and Isabelle’s daughter Abby, a stickler for order. Chance dictates these characters’ interactions, as does mutual attraction or dislike. Miscommunication is a major theme, at times blunted by almost farcical misunderstandings, as when Louise assumes Al is having an affair with Chloe, while Al assumes Louise no longer wants his affection. Lillian has just discovered she is pregnant and cannot bring herself to tell Tom, who later will take offense that Isabelle found out before he did. Isabelle knows that she is sliding into possible Alzheimer’s, and Abby (one of the more realistic portrayals) is exasperated that her younger siblings aren’t joining her in pressuring their mother to sell the family cabin to pay for her long-term care. At Isabelle’s behest (when she’s not forgetting things, she’s a wise woman), Chloe goes out with Finnegan, who encourages her to keep a notebook. She’s beginning to think he might be soul-mate material until she sees his trunk full of notebooks by other girlfriends, a disturbing find that Finnegan must explain in his own chapter. Lush descriptions of food, including the smells that provoke Lillian’s telltale morning sickness, tie it all together. Although the art of uncrossing all these mixed signals (a bit too neatly) is not lost on Bauermeister, the narrative, carried by so many disparate points of view, never quite comes into focus.
So robust and resilient are Bauermeister’s characters that readers may wish she had challenged them with thornier dilemmas.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16211-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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