“It’s not as simple as they make it on TV,” says Freddy. Says the reader, oh, dear, but yes it is.
Veteran Barthelme (stories: The Law of Averages, 2000, etc.) sets a semi-successful professor to wondering about the meaning of life—and the reader can actually take him seriously now and then.
How is it, ponders narrator Elroy, that a person’s life turns out as it does—so that “you have this, suddenly and startlingly not at all what you sought.” The answer is—well, you get older. Elroy, an artist until he got bored with the effort and repetitiveness of it, has been for years an art professor at a college in Biloxi—where he thinks mainly about his female students: the youth, allure, and mystery of them. His regrets at not having taken his sexual opportunities may have something to do with the decision he and his wife Clare make at story’s opening to “get some space into the marriage, some room to maneuver.” Elroy takes an apartment with a view of the water—and finds himself involved with student-aged kids: his own stepdaughter Winter, her racy female friend Freddy, the talented but troubled art student Edward Works (who’ll die), and Winter’s seeming lover, the curious Victor. Things wander as Elroy ponders his life and the unfulfilling world around him, fixates on the sexy Freddy, gets fellated by her in his college office, and . . . ? To fill book’s middle, there’s a pointless car trip to Memphis and Dallas taken by Elroy, Freddy, Winter, and Victor, with overnights, an Elroy/Freddy consummation, a hackneyed stick-up in a roadside stop-n-go, and a homecoming in Biloxi where wife Clare is troubled by the Elroy-Freddy consummation. The whole is accompanied by ultra-tough-talk (“It’s not a hard ass thing, it’s just shit happens. I mean, people say this stuff about it, but it passes”), and, after some quite lovely nostalgia-riffs by Elroy as he remembers his childhood, he finds himself gravitating back toward Clare.
“It’s not as simple as they make it on TV,” says Freddy. Says the reader, oh, dear, but yes it is.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-218-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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