Tantalizing echoes of Achebe and Conrad in an ambitious first novel. Set in a nameless East African country, where an aging president has power for life and the official (and only) political party, NAFU, controls every aspect of life, the story is as much about the struggles of hapless Samuel Kimbu to find meaning in existence as an indictment of what the West and corrupt Africans have done to the continent. Samuel—a customs officer at the port of Mutara, where Arab dhows and freighters share dockage—spends his day examining lading bills and responding to queries from sea captains and merchants. A former merchant marine officer, unfairly punished for an accident, he dreams of returning to his beloved sea but instead finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue involving the CIA and Inspector Zulu, head of Security. Sent to Yemen as a spy, Samuel takes passage on a mysterious dhow that's supplying guns to a putative liberation group. He's caught, jumps ship, and nearly dies, but then is rescued—only to find that the promise to get him a job at sea was merely a ruse. Increasingly bitter, Samuel discovers next that his boss has enriched himself by smuggling, and that lethal chemicals from abroad have been dumped in Shebeen Town, the poorest quarter of the city. Forced to participate in an initially unsuccessful raid on the rebel group, he has, while their party awaits rescue, a brief affair with the daughter of the CIA official who's there to direct the operation. Back in Matara at his old job, Samuel has lost his faith in God and man—all that remains are the stories in us, ``as if every human in the last analysis were only a story told more or less well.'' Requisite local color and characters all well done, but the promising narrative peters out into a not-so-subtle—though understandably outraged—indictment of the usual villains. Still, Michelsen is a writer to watch.
Pub Date: July 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-553-08932-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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