A debut that takes us into an Africa where—with Marciano as our guide—we are more likely to come upon Bianca Jagger than Nelson Mandela. “Let’s be honest about it,” heroine Esmé admits early on. “This is a story about white people in Africa. I am not going to pretend that it is anything else.” To which it might be helpful to add: not merely white people, but exceptionally bored, chic, and unhappy white people, the sort who snort cocaine in Nairobi restaurants and have trouble remembering whether they’ve slept with each other. Esmé herself fits in nicely: the Manhattan-bred daughter of a renowned Italian poet, she is taken to Kenya on safari after her father’s death and quickly decides to stay on. It’s not that she falls in love with Africa, exactly; she simply seems to have had her fill of everything else. So, she sends her boyfriend back home and moves in with Adam, the safari guide and big-fame hunter, who takes her on as his assistant and mistress, thereby bringing her into the very narrow confines of the expatriate scene. Here, she makes the rounds, shopping by day and clubbing by night, until she falls for Hunter Reed, a British journalist who covers tribal wars, swills champagne, and tries to expand Esmé’s horizons a bit. She becomes his lover but is unable to keep up with his needs and his cynicism. Eventually, she goes home to Italy to put him behind her, only to find him on her doorstep in Rome one day. By the time she returns to Africa she knows there’s no hope that they can make a life for themselves, but hope, in the end, is beside the point: “It’s because of love. Nobody ever moves to Africa for another reason.” Idiotic, hackneyed, unbearably pretentious: Marciano’s portraits of female vanity and masculine self-absorption would provide the makings of a satire worthy of Waugh—were there even the slightest curl of a smile on her lips. (First printing of 50,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40358-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 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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