Carey's eye and humor as a storywriter (Good Gossip, 1992) are here again, but even so her first novel—about family and divorce in the confusion of the late '60s—creeps at so benignly slow a pace as to risk its readers not waiting for the lovely close. Joan Toolan tells the story of having been 12—her chess-playing brother Hugh two years younger—when their mother left them with their unbalanced, piano-playing, war-veteran father in their western Massachusetts town. Heading for New York, ``our mother,'' as Joan always calls her, took a shabby apartment that placed her just minutes away from her sister Iris—the center of the enviably stylish and well-off ``other family'' that consists of Iris herself, psychiatrist husband Charles Eberlander, teenaged daughters Polly and Budge, and trusty Austrian maid, all living in a perfect Brooklyn Heights townhouse. When Joan and Hugh visit Brooklyn a few years in succession for summer weekends, though, the truth beneath the ``other'' family's elegant veneer gradually becomes more questionable. While Iris idealistically runs for public office, daughters Polly and Budge, coolly demure on the outside, spend their real energies playing with marijuana (for starters), and father Charles starts an affair with ex-patient Vi—to be discovered one day in flagrante by Joan and Budge at the Eberlander country house. Divorces (Charles from Iris, Vi from her husband) and other rearrangements follow, and yet the reader has the odd feeling, even so, that curiously little is happening—until at last, toward book's end, Iris is given center stage and shows herself capable of handling that honor with an unexpected tragicomic aplomb that makes for the novel's best scenes and for a perfect, delicate, three-point ending. Carey's in sure command of color, place, and atmosphere, but her characters themselves too often stay half-hidden, waiting to be drawn into true and full dimension.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-57639-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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