An agreeable mess, but then so is the protagonist—an endearingly distracted pursuer of the Ultimate Good who likes...
The conflict between assimilation and ethnic pride animates this vigorous picaresque by the Pakistani-born English screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette; Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) and author (The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990).
Sahid, a ``Paki'' university student in London, finds his emotional allegiances divided among his wish to study literature, write, and, generally, ``follow the rules'' and the various importunings of his career-oriented family (who run a travel agency), his Muslim ``brothers'' (who demand his participation in increasingly confrontational public protests against British racism), and his married instructor Dee Dee Osgood, who has more wisdom to offer Sahid than analyses of Great Books and the subtexts of rock lyrics. Kureishi's plot stumbles right along, rising to melodramatic heights whenever it focuses on Sahid's literal sibling, Chili; on a straying husband with a taste for available women and contraband cocaine; and on a bad habit of double-crossing intemperate drug suppliers. There's also an arresting sequence in which Sahid's friends orchestrate a demonstration supporting Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah imposed on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. The novel's loose construction leads it to a predictably open-ended conclusion, but that seems perfectly appropriate for a coming-of-age tale whose unformed hero can't decide from one moment to the next whether he's to become a dutiful son and brother, a great novelist, or the happily exhausted boy toy of a splendidly voracious woman. Furthermore, Kureishi's ever-so- slightly aslant diction and syntax provide dozens of gratifying little surprises, as do his vivid, off-the-wall metaphors (e.g., ``the city was drenched and slimy, like the inside of an aquarium'').
An agreeable mess, but then so is the protagonist—an endearingly distracted pursuer of the Ultimate Good who likes just as well the taste and feel of the here and now.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81342-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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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