Julavits does everything she can to turn readers off. But that may be her point.
Following her seriously dark first novel (The Mineral Palace, 2000), Julavits takes a real risk with this black comedy about an airplane hijacking, not exactly the subject to tickle most funny bones these days.
Having survived to become a student herself at the International Institute for Terrorist Studies, Alice recounts her hostage experience when Bruno, incongruously a blind man, and two inept cohorts take over the plane she and her sister Edith are passengers on, flying to Edith’s wedding in Morocco. The story is as much about sibling love and rivalry as about the ethical issues raised by terrorism—the women’s mutual devotion is balanced by their intense competitiveness for attention. As for the terrorists, it isn’t at all clear how dangerous they are, or whether the hijacking is some kind of elaborate hoax. The one hostage who’s shot—Edith thought the guns weren’t loaded—had already died of a heart attack. Although the other passengers seem frightened, Alice is never sure who’s real. She and Edith are genuinely scared even as they vie for Bruno’s attention. Edith uses sex. Alice, since she’s fluent in obscure languages, becomes the “the conduit” between Bruno and the hostage negotiator, who turns out to be Bruno’s brother. Apparently, these two siblings have followed different theories of fighting terrorism, and the outcome of the hijacking will determine who was right. Though ongoing banter between characters is meant to be both comic and profound, Julavits underlines her themes too heavily, especially the untrustworthiness of reality. The playing out of the hijacking itself is almost dull as hostages are released and the perpetrators disperse, allowing for no dramatic closure, so that the mystery of what really happened remains behind. In contrast to Ann Patchett’s humanistic view of the hostage experience in Bel Canto, Julavits’s brittle tone and edgy irony allow no reader empathy.
Julavits does everything she can to turn readers off. But that may be her point.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15049-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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