With prickly yet endearing Hattie, readers ponder the meaning of faith, commitment, love and loyalty without being fed easy...
In Jen’s latest (The Love Wife, 2004, etc.) a retired teacher—the daughter of an American missionary who abandoned organized Christianity and a Chinese father descended from Confucius—struggles to put her life back together after the deaths of her husband and best friend.
Hattie Kong, 65, has lived as an outsider in America since she was sent here from China after the Communist takeover in that country. After being widowed she moves to Riverlake, the New England vacation town where she spent summers as a girl. Two years later she is embedded in the community but remains deeply lonely, turning mainly to her dogs for companionship. So when a family of Cambodian refugees moves in next door, she can’t help involving herself in their troubled lives, giving them a wheelbarrow for their garden and befriending the teenage daughter, Sophy. But Hattie’s understanding of the family’s complex history is dangerously limited, and when Sophy becomes “born again” under the influence of a local woman whose brand of fundamental Christianity Hattie distrusts, the girl turns against not only Hattie but her troubled older brother with near tragic results. At the same time, retired biology professor Carter Hatch, the love of Hattie’s life, turns up in town to waken long-dormant and confusing emotions. Newly arrived in America from China, Hattie lived with the Hatches, a prominent family of intellectuals. Although she and Carter had only one sexual encounter before they married other people, they shared an unspoken bond as young biologists until he let her down professionally. Now they play a painful game of approach-avoidance. Meanwhile, Hattie’s Chinese relatives besiege her with requests that she re-bury her parents’ remains in the family’s Confucian cemetery for reasons she dismisses as superstitious.
With prickly yet endearing Hattie, readers ponder the meaning of faith, commitment, love and loyalty without being fed easy answers (except against the stereotypically villainous fundamentalist Christians). But the usually deft Jen has thrown too many characters into the stew, serving up a novel of ideas more easily admired than enjoyed.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27219-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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