Walking the line between self-obsession and thoughtful portraiture, Smyles explores an inextricable link between sex and...
Smyles (Iris Has Free Time, 2013) delivers a maddening and moving not-quite-novel, not-quite-memoir about a wayward eccentric who can’t connect with others.
Depending on how you look at it, Iris is a writer who spends not a moment of this novel writing—except that she has somehow managed to finish every page the reader holds. Instead of working, Iris thinks about her inability to maintain healthy relationships while simultaneously trying to frighten her friends and lovers away. As with most precocious would-be intellectuals, she’s able to list plenty of reasons why friendship is just too much of a hassle, even wishing for a Facebook- and Kickstarter-esque service that would allow “friends” to support one another monetarily in lieu of actually—God forbid—spending time together. In one of the book’s many hapless episodes, Iris even attempts to scare off a particularly boring boyfriend by popping in multiple documentaries about historic explorations gone haywire—the Donner Party, Shackleton & Co.—right before the doomed couple has sex. “I press on,” Iris confides to her reader, “viewing my debasement not as a failure of will but the final straw in a heroic tale of survival.” Characteristically, debasement is easier for Iris than actually cutting ties and facing the world alone, a reality she attempts to avoid at all costs. Emotional survival is the name of the game, since Iris lives in Manhattan thanks to an influx of cash from her parents that her brother dubs “I-fare, ‘like welfare but for Iris.' " At once both tone-deaf and bitingly funny, Smyles has created a contemporary portrait of the disaffected artist barely making her way in the big city, facing no repercussions except her own loneliness. Structured in small episodes like Homer’s Odyssey, which serves as an epigraph for the book, Smyles’ adventuress calls to mind a Jane Bowles heroine who's read Ulysses while scrolling in despair through 10 open apps on her iPhone. Smyles’ portrayal of Iris in all her weirdness offers much to recognize, fear, and embrace.
Walking the line between self-obsession and thoughtful portraiture, Smyles explores an inextricable link between sex and loneliness, self-loathing and self-acceptance in contemporary New York.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-70338-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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