Funny, clear-eyed look at female friendship from the prolific Heller (Lucky Stars, 2003, etc.).
What if your best friend turned into your worst enemy?
Is it legal to kill someone who has sex with your fiancé right before your wedding? Is it a little bit legal? Amy Sherman would like to know. She walked in on Tara Messer, naked and straddling an equally naked Stuart (admittedly an unimpressive sight—hunkalicious he is not) just as Tara shouted, “Take me home!” Four years later, Amy’s still sulking, while Tara and Stuart decorate a Mamaroneck mansion with tchotchkes bright and beautiful when not rolling around in the millions he makes running the family chain of gourmet grocery stores. Moving right along, Amy, a publicist for Lowry & Trammel, a New York publishing company, is not exactly thrilled with her new assignment: drumming up interest in Tara’s book of self-help advice for miserable women everywhere. Simply Beautiful is a shoo-in for the bestseller lists, even if it’s mostly recycled stuff swiped from others—hey, just like the way Tara swiped Stuart, Amy muses. In a fit of pique, Amy makes up an imaginary fiancé just so her life won’t seem utterly pathetic compared to that of her former friend. But then—yikes!—Tara, disgustingly gracious, invites her and the nonexistent fiancé to dinner, so she’s going to need a real one. One quick look at the self-appointed office studs and Amy’s ready to look elsewhere. How about mystery author Tony Stiles? He’s tall, sexy, and breathing—he’ll do. Segue to Tara’s POV and deep, dark secret: Stuart is a prize jerk and compulsive womanizer who’s mixed up with the Russian mob in a caviar-importing scheme. She’s far from happy and her life is far from perfect, but she’s determined to do something good for Amy. Another trip down the aisle awaits them both, but the roles—and the rules—are about to be reversed.
Funny, clear-eyed look at female friendship from the prolific Heller (Lucky Stars, 2003, etc.).Pub Date: April 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-28849-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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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