Minot works hard to pull it all together, but this is very uneven—and often very frustrating—work.
A long family history of incompatibility and enmity shatters several lives in this ambitious first novel, set in urban Massachusetts and on an island off the coast of Maine.
Initially, the narrator is Timmy Curtis, a 30-ish boy-man whose adulthood and marriage are shadowed by the figures of his late mother (killed when her car collided with a moving train) and distant “Dad” (a retired investment banker)—and, especially, by his free-floating younger brother Simon. The latter is a chronically under- or un-employed artist who subsists on “borrowed” money and maintains an angry nonrelationship with his dad, who wants Simon out of his life and refuses him living space in either of the family’s homes. When Simon secretly inhabits his old rooms, never noticed by his distracted father, things come to a head, even though the two never meet. Dad is found dead, and Simon is arrested and indicted for murder. The story then shifts among several viewpoints as well as past and present, juxtaposing the details of Simon’s ordeal (free on bail under surveillance, then house arrest) with numerous detailed flashbacks depicting the family’s retreats to its quiet haven on Burnt Island, and Simon’s increasingly conflicted standoffs with all the other Curtises except his impulsive “Mum” (whom Simon resembled as much as Timmy resembles buttoned-down Dad). The Blue Bowl (whose title denotes a missing object that suggests another theory of the murder) has a herky-jerky unevenness, marked by rambling sentences and muddy writing (the omnipresence of hippie jargon in Simon’s musings is particularly jarring) and sharp observations (“That’s horrible. She said it like a whore”) and images (“snow rested calmly over fields, loaved on cars”). And the predictable (though inconclusive) outcome of Simon’s trial is followed by an almost unbelievably lame last-minute surprise ending.
Minot works hard to pull it all together, but this is very uneven—and often very frustrating—work.Pub Date: April 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-394-57348-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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