A family drama wonderfully complete in every detail, but most astute and memorable in depicting the quirky brilliance...
The mysteries at the core of an adolescent boy’s being are placed in a tender, precious light in Hamilton’s latest triumph (The History of a Prince, 1998, etc.), which also poignantly portrays a mother torn between a lover’s embrace and the family she’s long called her own.
What binds mother and son dramatically together is her e-mail, which her quiet, reasonable 17-year-old Henry has begun to read in secret, upstairs in their Chicago home. It’s not an intentional act, at first, but when he learns that his mom, Beth, a passionate pianist, is having a deeply fulfilling affair with a fellow musician, he reduces himself to snooping almost daily. Henry can’t quite fathom what he views as Beth’s betrayal, even though he does recognize her lover’s way with words; but neither can he bring himself to tell anyone what he knows—not his father, the socialist high-school teacher, not his 13-year-old sister Elvira, a Civil War enactor whom the term “fervent” doesn’t begin to describe, not even his poet friend Karen. Instead, Henry has to deal in his quiet way with what he knows, putting distance and hostility between himself and Beth as a way of masking the pain. Meanwhile, the family’s annual week at a music camp back east has opened Henry’s own eyes to love and desire, as one night with a girl he’s known practically since birth leaves him pining for more. He gets his wish when Lily comes to Chicago to look at colleges, but relations between him and his mother only deteriorate further as her liaison continues, until a shocking incident involving Elvira at the long-awaited Shiloh reenactment forces him to look at his mother in a new light—and forces her to reexamine her commitment to those she loves.
A family drama wonderfully complete in every detail, but most astute and memorable in depicting the quirky brilliance peculiar to teenage thoughts and deeds.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-50117-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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