That closing section suggests real potential in an otherwise unremarkable first novel.
Turbulence roils three relationships in a family as its members gather for a Midwestern wedding.
Families spawn secrets, and the Gruens of Ryville, Michigan, are no exception. There’s headstrong Will Gruen, full-time commercial airline pilot and part-time farmer, queasy about his upcoming mandatory retirement; he’ll switch to a Chinese airline (no age restrictions), but he hasn’t told his wife Carol yet, nor has she, a brittle control freak, told Will how advanced her own plans are for a farmhouse-style bed-and-breakfast. Their passive younger daughter Leanne is flying in for her wedding with fiancé Kit, but she hasn’t told him about her drinking problem. In the worst shape, and hiding the biggest secret, is older daughter Margaret, a hitherto-confident perfectionist now assailed by self-doubt. She’s driving from Illinois with her small son Trevor. Along with her husband, David, she teaches at Northwestern, and her plan is to pretend that David’s absence is due to work, though in fact their “open marriage” is crumbling (before leaving, Margaret called the cops, fearing physical abuse). That’s the set-up, and constantly shifting viewpoints among parents and daughters, together with numerous flashbacks, make for considerable diffuseness. Strand’s focus can be eccentric, too. There’s too much about Will’s brief experience as a fighter-pilot in Vietnam, and a long flashback about Margaret’s unkind treatment of an ex-boyfriend takes up space that could better have gone to David, and to Margaret’s Indian lover, Vasant. A tentativeness surrounds the core problems. Is Leanne an actual alcoholic? She’s not sure. Is David capable of violence? And does Margaret truly believe his compulsive womanizing is just a “glitch”? Only in the last 40 pages does the tension start to crackle. Cops arrive to check out David’s allegation that Margaret has kidnapped their son; Leanne rediscovers whiskey; and Carol and Will (his secret out) stare bleakly into their future.
That closing section suggests real potential in an otherwise unremarkable first novel.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6684-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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