Not likely to find many fans this side of the Atlantic.
Debut fiction (published in 1994 in England) from the megaselling author of Bridget Jones novels, this about an African refugee camp volunteer who enlists her glamorous London friends for a celebrity benefit.
Rosie Richardson is a young literary publicist, naive to a fault and madly in love with Oliver Marchant, a handsome cad who hosts a well-regarded BBC show on the arts, when she first volunteers for SUSTAIN (a famine relief agency). Heartbroken over Oliver’s refusal to make a commitment, and fed up with his selfishness and terribly, terribly controlling behavior about important things like her nondesigner clothing, Rosie heads for Africa, determined to do something about the starving innocents caught in the crossfire of yet another civil war. She returns to London somewhat sadder and wiser, but volunteers again several years later. Many ironic cultural misunderstandings ensue, and, of course, there is all that messy dying to cope with. But cope Rosie does, along with a predictable cast of supporting others: Henry, a raffish and oversexed aide, who charms the khaki pants off Sian, a pretty nurse, when not being chided by Dr. Betty, a saintly older woman who is soon replaced by a love interest for Rosie—Robert O’Rourke, a dedicated and selfless physician. All well and good, but Rosie seems to view the unspeakable tragedy of mass starvation as a mere backdrop for her own decidedly minor problems of unrequited love and general anomie. Meanwhile, the people she’s come to help are seen mostly as dirty, fatalistic, and—worst—utterly impractical. When famine strikes again, though, Rosie gets the sort of remorseful Oliver to corral some famous folk for an international benefit and save the day. Sort of. Fielding’s heroine may not share the overt racism of the relief agency’s press rep, who hopes to introduce “the notion of the learned African person . . . thirsting for knowledge to replace what we call the Starving Monkey Myth,” but Rosie is unpleasantly condescending all too often. And the contrast between London’s media elite—the chattering classes, and how—and the mute suffering of the famine’s helpless victims makes for heavy-handed satire at best.
Not likely to find many fans this side of the Atlantic.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89450-8
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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