The recent warmhearted memoirs by Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (Elegy for Iris, 1999), virtually guarantee a receptive...
This thoroughly unremarkable short story (of which only an excerpt previously appeared, in a 1957 anthology) won’t add anything to the deservedly high reputation of the late (1918–99) author of such enchantments as The Bell, Bruno’s Dream, and The Green Knight.
Handsomely illustrated with appropriately moody line drawings by American artist Michael McCurdy, it’s a piece of kitchen-sink realism that adumbrates in embryonic form the mythic texture that’s thick enough to stir in Murdoch’s mature novels. Protagonist Yvonne Geary lives with her nagging mother and placid uncle in a modest home attached to the family’s Dublin shop. Yvonne balks at marriage to her unglamorous suitor, tailor Sam Goldman: she’s awaiting “something special.” She and her mother disagree over whether to purchase lavish or plain and serviceable Christmas cards. An evening walk with Sam turns into an embarrassing misadventure in a downstairs tavern (which Murdoch describes in images suggesting a hell on earth). The “something special” that Sam impulsively insists on showing Yvonne is decidedly unromantic—as, it seems, will be her future, to which she passively surrenders in the trail-away conclusion. Aside from a few faint echoes of Joyce’s “The Dead,” the story’s of interest chiefly for its demonstration of Murdoch’s gift for locating worlds of implication in commonplace quotidian dialogue, and for an occasional flash of the kind of understated animism that graced her later fiction (e.g., when Yvonne returns home late at night, “in the shop it was very silent and all the objects upon the shelves were alert and quiet like little listening animals”).
The recent warmhearted memoirs by Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (Elegy for Iris, 1999), virtually guarantee a receptive audience for this rather odd publication. But admirers of Iris Murdoch at her best may well wonder what all the fuss is about.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-393-05007-6
Page Count: 55
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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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