Uproarious, sharp, and outrageously funny joyride with plenty of octane, though it doesn’t really go anywhere in the end.
An award-winning Icelandic novelist makes his English-language debut with a kind of Arctic Bright Lights, Big City, following the nocturnal misadventures of an overgrown baby who refuses to grow up.
As depicted here, the better part of Iceland’s populace are either writers or drunks. Our antihero Hlynur Bjorn drinks a fair amount every night himself and is always working Shakespearean quotes into his conversation. Thirty-three-year-old Hlynur still lives with his mother and is happily unemployed. He usually gets up shortly before Mom comes home from work, browses the bookstores, and spends the evenings in Reykjavik nightclubs with his pals Throstur and Guildy. Most nights Hlynur finds someone to have sex with, but he doesn’t have a steady girlfriend and is in no rush to find one. Iceland is a pretty broadminded place, sexually speaking (when Hlynur’s lesbian mother came out of the closet all he had to say was “cool”), so it’s easy not to commit. But several unexpected events complicate this happy routine. First, Hlynur falls for Mom’s girlfriend Lolla. Second, a woman Hlynur slept with a couple of times turns up pregnant with his child and decides to have the baby. Third, Guildy is diagnosed with AIDS. And fourth (this is a little while later), Lolla turns out to be pregnant by Hlynur as well. There are a lot of additional minor crises (e.g., Hlynur’s drunkard father falls off the wagon), but they go by the wayside once everyone starts getting pregnant. Hlynur tries his best to keep to his schedule of books, booze, porn, and sex, but suddenly he finds himself faced with emotional crises of a magnitude for which he is wholly unprepared. Is he actually going to get serious and decide what he wants from life? We all have to, sooner or later—even in Iceland.
Uproarious, sharp, and outrageously funny joyride with plenty of octane, though it doesn’t really go anywhere in the end.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2514-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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