It’s possible to emerge from this fictional memoir of a colorful, irascible but likable painter with almost no idea of what...
A 70-year-old painter looks back on a life of women and art and ponders the present-day challenges of aging in this loose-limbed narrative.
This is the third Mirabelli (The Goddess in Love with a Horse, 2008, etc.) novel involving members of the Italian-American Cavallù-Stillamare clan, which Renato joined as a foundling in 1930. Family features prominently in the painter’s memories, as do friends, food, and lovers, for all of which he has a hearty appetite into his seventh decade and speaks of warmly. On the sex side, he has: teacher-related fantasies in the fifth grade; a rich marriage that is a fine little love story in itself; a threesome that produces a child he and his wife semi-adopt; and various flings. Yet when the book focuses on his present life at 70, he’s living in relative isolation in his Boston studio while his wife, Alba, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is ostensibly so Renato can focus on painting, but there are suggestions of connubial friction. The marital tensions aren’t improved when a former student’s daughter and her child move into the studio, though the book benefits from a bit of suspense: will he kick her out before or after he sleeps with her? The other thread tugging a reader through is Renato’s halting efforts to get a gallery show, something he hasn’t had in some 30 years, though he and others reckon he’s one of the best painters around. Things look good when a hot dealer shows interest, but she proves hard to nail down. There’s also some suspense concerning Renato’s prostate, among the many pains of aging. What there’s strangely little of from this voluble, engaging, intelligent character is specific talk about art and painting as craft, about color, space, technique, brush stroke, history, influences.
It’s possible to emerge from this fictional memoir of a colorful, irascible but likable painter with almost no idea of what he paints, and that’s frustrating.Pub Date: May 3, 2012
ISBN: 9780929701967
Page Count: 308
Publisher: McPherson & Company
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2016
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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