An Oliver Sacks-ish New York shrink hangs out with an upbeat Man Who Fell to Earth in this banal debut. At the outset, an oddball patient calling himself ``prot'' and claiming to be a 357-year-old visitor from the planet K-PAX is delivered to the care of a psychiatrist named ``Gene Brewer.'' Prot, we learn, is a delusional amnesiac with a dual personality who has devised an elaborate fiction to compensate for a trauma suffered by the real person hidden beneath his cosmic obfuscations. K-PAX, as prot informs Gene during their sessions, is a mostly charmed world devoid of carnivores, aggression, and stress, where everyone subsists on fruit and grains, avoids sex (because it's painful), and talks to the animals. By exceeding the speed of light, K-PAXians can wander to other planets, which prot has done in order to help his human counterpart, Robert Porter, a catatonic former slaughterhouse worker laden with the weight of repressed memories. Unfortunately for Gene, prot is scheduled to ``depart'' only a few months after their regimen of therapy has begun, so the doctor must race against time to recover what he can of Robert's submerged biography from his protector and mouthpiece—that is, prot—before he disappears. With the help of hypnotism and a plucky newspaperwoman, Gene just might cure the spaceman and bring Robert back from catatonia. Meanwhile, prot offers commonsense remedies to his fellow zanies (an entertaining bunch) and to Gene's mildly dysfunctional family, employing a quasi-Christian, know-thyself riff that fans of Eliseo Subiela's similarly plotted film, Man Facing Southeast, will find most familiar. A genial psych lecture supplemented by a hefty dose of utopian blather. (Film rights to Universal)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11840-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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