Mawkish morass of gloom, lightly frothed with escapism. Sure to wow fans of Oprah laureate Mitchard (Twelve Times Blessed,...
Middle-aged woman beset by MS and a twerpy husband nevertheless triumphs, aided by her learning-disabled but preternaturally articulate teenaged son.
In this ungainly and overwrought sob-story, advice columnist Julieanne, an accomplished ballet dancer married to lawyer Leo Steiner, senses something awry when her leg won’t move during a Pilates stretch. Soon, Leo, who’s been courting eccentricity with New Age e-pen-pals, exercise binges, and penny-pinching, turns 49 and announces he wants a sabbatical from his job and marriage. After a trial trip, he decamps on a permanent bliss hunt. Julieanne, whose column pays a pittance, must scramble to cover the experimental Interferon shots she needs to forestall full-blown MS. Her teenage son Gabe, whose journal chronicles the far more entertaining half of this saga, steps into his father’s role with the Steiners’ late-life child, toddler Aurora, but drops out of school, where as a Special Ed student he has been mostly misunderstood. Leo’s mortified elderly parents and Julieanne’s lesbian psychologist friend Cathy also step up to help with Julieanne’s chaotic finances and MS- and chemo-induced meltdowns. Julieanne’s column is syndicated after a few entries, ghostwritten by Gabe and Cathy, amping up her reputation. Adolescent daughter Caroline, buffeted by too-abrupt personality shifts, won’t care-give, but she inaugurates a spring-break road trip, with Gabe, to retrieve Leo from his intentional community of jam-brewing weavers. Imagine their shock to learn that Leo now has an infant son and his 28-year-old consort is pregnant again. Not much else is left to the imagination, since each bump in the terrain of pain is micro-measured. But wait! Treacly, just-in-time rescue rides in with Matt MacDougall, grade-school dweeb turned wealthy and hunky surgeon, who, it turns out, still nurses a crush on Julieanne. Not only that, her poem is published by what sounds suspiciously like the New Yorker.
Mawkish morass of gloom, lightly frothed with escapism. Sure to wow fans of Oprah laureate Mitchard (Twelve Times Blessed, 2003, etc.).Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-058724-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
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