Immigrant history palatably told, with a little bodice-ripping romance thrown in for good measure.
It’s a formula as old as time: If you want your heart broken, fall in love with a star.
A pop star, that is—or, in the case of Delaney’s latest (Shannon, 2009, etc.), a star of the stage, Venetia Kelly. The story crosses the continents between Ireland and New York, along which route young Ben MacCarthy loses his father to the wiles of the temptress—a woman born out of wedlock, unmarried and of the theater, enough to banish her from polite society. Sent by mater to fetch pater from the viper’s lair, young Ben falls in love with Venetia himself and runs off to join the traveling show. Will bliss follow? Dear reader, if you know an Irish story, you would never imagine it, though there are some moments in Delaney’s leisurely novel where the misery is slightly less compounded than in others. All right, will young Ben at least find misery in the company of Venetia? That depends on whether Venetia turns out to be the settling-down type, which is, well, problematic but possible, as the author illustrates. But Ben and Venetia and the rest of Delaney’s characters are really props through which the author can deliver lightly spun histories of the Irish at home and in New York, working old grievances (“The idea of socially acceptable Irish in nineteenth-century New York—call that an oxymoron. No matter what their wealth, the new Irish-Americans had a tough haul”) and reveling in lyrical language to describe the everyday (“I organized some bread and marmalade, and a glass of milk”; “He had attended to whomsoever he’d needed to see and had come back to find me”) Delaney writes with immediacy and without anachronism, though in well-tried style that some will find enchanting and others trying, such as his habit of breaking the fourth wall at odd moments to address the reader. Fans won’t mind.
Immigrant history palatably told, with a little bodice-ripping romance thrown in for good measure.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6783-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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