Two startling novellas offering meticulous explorations of the power of self-delusion, and featuring some none-too-innocent Americans abroad in the confusing precincts of contemporary Europe. Prose, the author of nine novels (Hunters and Gatherers, 1995, etc.), has always been fascinated by the tangled origins of human behavior. ``Guided Tours of Hell'' follows the hallucinatory misadventures of Landau, a second-rate American playwright attending a conference on Franz Kafka in Prague. He's quickly overshadowed by the riveting figure of Jiri Krakauer, a writer who, as an adolescent, was sent to a concentration camp where, he claims, he became the lover of Ottala Kafka, Franz's sister. The larger-than-life Jiri leads the conferees on a journey to the camp, and in that grim setting he and Landau become locked in an increasingly ugly competition for attention. Landau casts doubt on Jiri's Holocaust memories, and Jiri is volubly sarcastic about Landau's insecurity, his yearning to exchange his crabbed life for one as oversized (and filled with horror) as Jiri's. Prose offers some highly original observations on the deforming power of envy and the dangerously uncertain nature of memory, as well as a compelling meditation on contemporary attitudes toward the Holocaust. ``Three Pigs in Five Days'' follows the frantic efforts of Nina, a young journalist sent to Paris in midwinter by her editor at a travel journal (an older man who is also her lover), to come to terms with her obsessive love for him. Some of the scenes, including Nina's tour of the erotically charged Rodin museum, and a journey through the city's catacombs, are perfectly rendered. But Nina's passivity, her unwillingness to jettison her manipulative lover (who shows up at her hotel), becomes more irritating than compelling, while the end seems rushed and unpersuasive. ``Three Pigs'' is nonetheless vivid and disturbing, and ``Guided Tours of Hell''— exact, unsparing—is a superb, powerful work. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4861-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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
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
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