Culled from the past decade's Pushcart Prize selections, a collection for those who like their tales of love light on sentimentality and with a twist. Some of the best work features strong voices from people of color. In ``Crazy Life'' by Lou Mathews, Chuey's girlfriend gets him off the hook for a murder rap, but Chuey abandons his partner to a prison term and the East LA community makes life miserable for him. Lorna Goodison's ``By Love Possessed,'' set in Jamaica, details the affair of Dottie and Frenchie, who is ``probably better looking than Ricardo Montalban'' but unemployed. Dottie looks like Olive Oyl but can support Frenchie. The tenuous trade of different currencies ends disastrously. Likewise, Joyce Carol Oates's ``The Hair'' tells of one rather ordinary couple's friendship with a pair of socialites. The first couple's efforts to hold on to their status-lending friends threaten to compromise their own marriage. Incest is a frequent theme or subplot in the collection. ``Lawns'' by Mona Simpson portrays an abusive situation and its damaging effects on the daughter in later life. ``Hush Hush'' by Steven Barthelme presents a more off-beat, yet compelling incestuous scenario. If there is a flaw in this collection, it's that it takes itself too seriously. The book could use more entries such as ``Tell Me Everything'' by Leonard Michaels—perhaps the most well- crafted and playful of the lot, featuring an epic novel embedded within the story. ``Yukon'' by Carol Emshwiller likewise provides a refreshing perspective. A north woods woman leaves her bearish, north woods man and shacks up with an actual bear in a cave. She's happier with the bear, for a while. Many of ``the rest of us'' will be pleased with this thoughtful collection of intelligent romances. However, it fails to include a number of topics: safe sex, cybersex, etc. Also, the focus is overwhelmingly heterosexual.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-916366-90-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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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