In a swarming of images, bright diversions, and symbolism which seems to flip belly-up before your eyes, Calisher again stirs toward coherence but lands mostly among impressive isles of total chaos. Lexie, from teenager to matron, begins and ends the story on the two banks of the Hudson. In a 4:00 a.m. N.Y, harbor pier-side wrangle with her parents, Lexie begins her "voyage to the interior" by reaching out to the "city" she'd heard about from her father—her own erogenous zone. The penetration of her "empty space," as she looks for her own "special language," proceeds 30 miles up the Hudson River, where she lives—as wife, mother, and lover—in a Victorian mansion. After years of young children ("love buttered") and fabled neighbors' enchanted nights (a swimming pool "bobbing with pale-gold oval faces"), Lexie takes a trip that stops just short of the bridge to that city (O-ho) and finally finds the perfect meld of dominance and submission in sex. The close is a serio/comic vision, with the suburban matron and her estranged husband nude on the grass, viewed by their grown children who are plotting escape from the family tower—after an attempted suicide by one and hints of incest. Now Lexie, presumably having settled the matter of what is solely female and what is personal ("In her relationships with men. . . have they been with herself?") rears up like "a dinosaur on the edge of extinction" and yells out: "Ah! I give birth to them. The women. Him. All Awareness. . . ." For the reader who goes the distance on this slow, muddy, but tantalizing track—Distance is the key. Back off and you'll spy the themes and counter-themes, you'll hear the horns of serf-land gently blowing on the Hudson. Ahhhhhh! or Arghhhhh!, depending on your stamina, and Calisher experience.a
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1977
ISBN: 0425039366
Page Count: -
Publisher: Arbor House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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