Four angry young 1970s women form a feminist publishing house in London only to find their own ambition no less virulent than men’s—in Weldon’s (Wicked Women, 1997, etc.) wry and witty examination of where feminism went wrong and, occasionally, right. The sexual revolution has just begun, but Stephanie is already fed up with her marriage to antiques dealer Hamish, a suburban heartthrob who lusts after every woman but her. Hosting a consciousness-raising meeting one summer evening, Stephanie thrills to the suggestion made by Layla, an heiress, that the women start their own publishing house and call it Medusa. She even joins in as Layla, Alice (an academic and I Ching addict), and Zoe (overeducated housewife/mom) defiantly remove their clothes and dance naked and unashamed before the living room windows. But when Stephanie wanders upstairs to find Daffy, another “sister,” getting it on with Hamish, she abandons the house without even her clothes, leaving husband, home and children in guileless Daffy’s hands. Stephanie’s marriage may be dead, but Medusa has been born; for the next two-and-a-half decades, Stephanie, Layla, and Alice struggle to keep their woman-centered business solvent without crossing the border into “unacceptable” commercial success. Along the way, they suffer the indignities of loneliness—as the courts limit Stephanie’s access to her children, Layla continues an affair with a powerful but married man, and Alice moves ever closer to the maniacal extremes of goddess-worship. But at least they have each other. Zoe, who opted for a traditional family life, labors in isolation on her book (Lost Women) and then commits suicide when her husband tells her (falsely) that Medusa has turned the manuscript down. Eventually, Medusa turns the book into a massive success—but with success will come the seeds of disintegration. Weldon’s clever comparisons of yesterday’s mores to today’s spice up this bubbling feminist brew, offering a study of the costs and consequences of the idealistic life that is sharp, funny, and all too true.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-87113-720-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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