Desperately contrived, but the bitchiness is fun in small doses.
Brown’s fiction debut is a bitter comedy about divorce in California’s Silicon Valley, where apparently men are even more ruthless in marriage than in business.
The same day his pharmaceutical company stock rises meteorically, Paul Miller sends his wife, via messenger, a typed note letting her know that he is leaving her for her tennis partner. Forty-nine-year-old Janice is shocked. She and Paul have been married since she became pregnant in college with their first daughter, Margaret, now 29, and she gave up her dreams to become Paul’s perfect wife—or at least a smashing cook and tennis player. The kind of controlled suburban matron who keeps herself and her home in immaculate condition, Janice doesn’t have a clue about her daughters. After spending most of her childhood overweight and unpopular, 14-year-old Lizzie has recently lost weight and become more popular—or at least busy—since she started having sex with any boy who asks. Margaret, who moved to Los Angeles with her actor boyfriend several years ago, much to her parents’ dismay, has driven the boyfriend away and racked up close to $100,000 in debt running a feminist magazine that even she knows is pretentious twaddle. Learning of the impending divorce, Margaret rushes home not to care for her distraught mother but to escape her creditors. Meanwhile, a distraught Janice starts drinking heavily and buying methamphetamines from the pool guy. Then Margaret discovers that Paul is trying to screw Janice out of her share of his wealth—he even attempts bribing Margaret to testify against her mother in court—and she is galvanized into action. Meanwhile, Lizzie, who has joined a Christian youth group and signed an abstinence oath, realizes she is pregnant. Janice and her daughters bicker and keep secrets from each other but eventually they unite against Paul, who, like most of the male characters, is a total jerk.
Desperately contrived, but the bitchiness is fun in small doses.Pub Date: May 27, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52401-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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