A seasoned author of gay writing, both fiction and nonfiction (the anthology Waves, 1994; the Buddies trilogy, etc.), returns, this time with a vast and emphatically sweeping saga of queer life since 1949. Beginning in the heady Hollywood years following WW II and concluding with the AIDS-scourged 90's, Mordden chronicles the lives of 15 members of an emerging gay and lesbian postwar community. The premise—that sometime in the 1950's homosexuals began to tire of their insular communities and long for broader acceptance—is less than revelatory, but the manner in which the author plays it out is lively and often scabrously comic. The ball gets rolling when Frank Hubbard, an LA vice cop and closeted queer, abandons the force to start a moving company with his newfound lover. By 1985, he's drifted from LA to New York to San Francisco, encountering torchy cabaret acts like the scoldingly witty Kid, cerebral and entrepreneurial lesbians like nightclub manager Lois, and a gaggle of straights, hustlers, and porn stars. Frank eventually gets sick and kills himself in heroic fashion, but not before he garners a reputation as a sort of gay Achilles, never shrinking from the good fight. Interspersed with his story are several other linked tales, mostly reminiscent of the Edmund White pattern: Misunderstoods on both sides of the sexual fence flee Middle America for the ribald sanctuary of the big cities, where they boink like rabbits just off the farm and, it seems, spend almost all their spare time chatting each other up. (The novel is narrated almost entirely through dialogue.) Mordden covers his history with remarkable effectiveness—particularly gay Hollywood in the George Cukor era—and the banter is priceless. So baggy and so expansive in its generosity to its subjects that it could only be a novel; no one would have time for the movie, and there isn't a theater big enough to stage the play.
Pub Date: May 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41529-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Villard
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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