Indiana has plenty of room to send up what he sees as the strangely empty landscape of American culture, while his dashing...
The third installment in the author’s American Crime trilogy, inspired by real-life mother-and-son team Sante and Kenneth Kimes.
With trademark exuberance and venom, Indiana (Three-Month Fever, 1999, etc) here spins a dizzying tale of Evangeline (or is it Evelyn? Ellen? Eve?) and her son Devin, modern-day grifters with a peculiar genius for knowing exactly how to use people. Their “fanatical obdurate bravura” allows them to balance on the ragged edge of disaster with barely a wobble—other than Evangeline being jailed for four years or so for slave trafficking. Moving on the fringes of the American West—Arizona, Hawaii—they seek their marks, ranging from Evangeline's husband Warren (whose illegal activities and confidence schemes pale in comparison to those of his spouse) to her somewhat loyal employees to drifters whose usefulness Evangeline can size up in a split second. Indiana begins with chapters titled for characters touched by Evangeline—Varlene, the crank-addicted accountant; Otis, the sad-sack arsonist who can’t understand how he ended up torching the Slotes’ Hawaiian estate—but the story circles in ever more tightly as we approach Evvy’s final project. Bald descriptions of Evangeline's incestuous acts with Devin are disturbing, but when the second half of the story introduces Baby Claymore, their latest victim, an extravagantly imagined millionairess (a former Esther Williams “aquabat” determined to create a foundation celebrating the seamstress’s craft), the plot takes on the appeal of an elegantly executed train wreck.
Indiana has plenty of room to send up what he sees as the strangely empty landscape of American culture, while his dashing prose sweeps the reader along to a climax that is no less compelling for being inevitable.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019726-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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