An unconvincing second outing (after Raven Stole the Moon, 1998).
Here’s what happens when an epileptic rock musician tries his hand at single parenting.
Evan Wallace is the son of a wealthy Seattle heart surgeon. When he was 12, he chivalrously substituted for his kid brother in a game of chicken and was hit by a car; his injuries resulted in epilepsy. At 17, his girlfriend, Tracy, became pregnant, had their baby, but then left town with her family, freezing Evan out. He went on to become a guitarist, with one big hit. Now, as the story opens, Evan is 31, Tracy is dead from a car accident, and he’s attending her funeral in Walla Walla, an uninvited guest who sees his son, Dean, for the first time and introduces himself as his father. Then, wham! Tracy’s abusive father assaults his wife—who knows why—and charges toward Dean. Evan drives his son to safety in Seattle, and Dean reacts like any young teenager with a dead mother and a father who’s belatedly recognized his existence: He’s curious, angry, bitter and as changeable as a spring day. Evan is no role model. Though prone to seizures, he won’t level with Dean about his condition and continues to drive (against medical advice). Luckily, there’s an adult around, the legendary sound engineer Mica Morrison. She’s part black, part Japanese, smart, gorgeous and available, way too good for the thoroughly confused Evan, though inexplicably she’s all over him. She sparks up Dean, too, while offering Evan sage advice on handling his son. Evan, revealingly, thinks of Mica and Dean as his “two new toys,” and he steadily loses reader sympathy as he refuses Mica’s help and that of his own parents. He has a seizure while driving, then checks himself out of the hospital before an operation for a shattered collarbone. His last-minute epiphany, that he has an emotional age of 14, is something the reader had noticed long before.
An unconvincing second outing (after Raven Stole the Moon, 1998).Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56947-390-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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