Sort of a men’s weeper, but funny, sexy, and thoughtful.
Easterbrook turns to the novel again (This Magic Moment, not reviewed) after some serious nonfiction (Beside Still Waters, 1998, etc.) and does quite well: involuntary time-travel to his better past self nearly queers a very big deal for a hotshot lawyer.
Jaded and deeply unhappy attorney Carter Morris, whose ridiculous but apparently legal solution to the problems of the fashion chain Value Neutral is about to rain big-big money on himself and the openly amoral law firm in which he is a partner, has begun to scare the daylights out of his colleagues. At a succession of critical moments leading to the consummation of the super settlement, Carter keeps vanishing. Literally. Negotiations with Value Neutral have taken him to the city and scene of his youthful triumphs as a Galahad in the 1960s peace movement, and he keeps bumping into himself—as a young man. In very confused pre-incarnations, he’s continually popping back to particular Carters, beginning with the sweaty, baseball-playing prepubescent Carter and working his way through to the Carter of the great moment when he saved a huge rally from governmental interference, met Walter Cronkite, and possibly set a real-life future senator on his political path. To greatly complicate things, the land of his past, unlike Narnia, does not return him to the present with only a few minutes gone missing. Instead, he’s returned a very inconvenient one or two days late from wherever he was supposed to be, usually a vital meeting. Fortunately, each absence, however much it may enrage his partners, seems to make an admiring Value Neutral voluntarily cough up ever more millions. The retro-trips become increasingly poignant as Carter reviews failed relationships with his childhood pal, his brother, and Jayne Ann, the lost love of his life. Will he reclaim his ideals? Will he patch things up with everybody, including himself? Will he keep the money?
Sort of a men’s weeper, but funny, sexy, and thoughtful.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28647-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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