Schulman's range of tone is not wide—it runs from somber to meditative—and does not dare too much, but in its limited sphere...
Schulman’s fourth volume is a collection of elegies and prayers, whose last note is an injunction, overheard rather than delivered: “Praise life.” But most of these poems are works of remembrance, and often grief; they concern lonely stretches of road, dead mothers, and heroines lost at sea. The need to rhapsodize apparently comes later, when the ghosts are, if not quite laid to rest, at least faced for what they are. Schulman writes a graceful line, with such subtle shifts of syntax and direction that only after eight lines of muffled pentameter (in “Poem Ending with a Phrase from the Psalms”) do you realize that the whole affair is a single sentence. Her rhymes, sparingly employed, can be so understated that they nearly merge with the meter, eschewing the hammer blows of emphasis: in “Carnegie Hill Birdlore,” she links “wake” with “mosaic,” and “icons” with “stones,” all of which takes a fine chisel. Though she does not strike too many classicist notes, Schulman is comfortable with the formal devices she selects, which include a powerful sonnet sequence about her mother’s death and her own attempt to see that life as it was, in detail. Schulman’s other large theme is New York, a city that presents itself to her in ancient dress, a kind of Rome for the New World. Whitman and Crane necessarily loom like skyscrapers in the background, but Schulman’s treatment is deflationary: it avoids cosmic allegories in favor of the personal and historical. In “Brooklyn Bridge,” the poet meets “a vision of my grandmother in 1920, / belled skirt, braided red hair. She slithers under her stalled Ford and out again, tarred black, then cranks the engine.”
Schulman's range of tone is not wide—it runs from somber to meditative—and does not dare too much, but in its limited sphere her golden bowl is flawless.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-08622-6
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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
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