Norman, known for such pulpers as Shattered Stars and Chateau Ella, lands in lukewarm water with her latest—the completely unsurprising story of Magdalen Gabriel, a ``woman of ever-changing names, one year Swiss, the next French, and...American.'' Magdalen's driven by nothing exactly, but she is slightly haunted since her beloved papi, Alexander, was torn from her when she was only seven, and under scandalous circumstances that included his drinking buddy, Zeleyev, and a brutalized prostitute. When papi disappears, he takes with him a statue called Eternite made by his father and Zeleyev and composed of a treasure chest full of jewels once owned by a Russian countess. Poor Maggy can't abide her anal Swiss mom and new stepdad, so she runs away to Paris, where she's taught to sing by a Jewish cantor, renames herself Madeleine, tries her hand as a housemaid, and falls in love with Antoine Bonnard, a restaurateur who smokes Gauloises. But he dies of a stroke right after she bears him a son, leaving Zeleyev to help her establish herself in New York. And as Manhattan Maddy, she works at Zabar's, marries a nice private detective whom she meets at the cheese counter, and eventually comes to learn that her old friend Zeleyev has been obsessed with getting his hands on Eternite all along. So obsessed, in fact, that he helps Maddy's long-lost papi do himself in and kidnaps Maddy's son—a little eleventh-hour glitch that Maddy's very own p.i. hub helps her solve. Norman's a very professional writer, but her plot here is tired and her heroine undistinguished. Indeed, the best thing one can say of her (along with her former employer, Monsieur Lussac) is that she was ``the most original maid I have ever known.''
Pub Date: May 11, 1992
ISBN: 0-525-93469-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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