Still, the sound of Great Personalities clashing makes a rollicking good read.
Scottish novelist and storywriter Galloway (Where You Find It, 2002, etc.) brings us the life and work of Clara Schumann in an impassioned fictional biography.
Young Clara Wieck of Leipzig is her egotistical father’s prize piano pupil: by the time she’s seven, he is molding her into the severely disciplined performer she’ll be for the rest of her life. Her mother, a singer, is sent away and superfluously divorced as the father-daughter duo systematically conquers Europe with Clara’s bafflingly precocious performances of Schubert and Beethoven. When Herr Wieck takes on the patronage of the brilliant, dreamy pianist and composer Robert Schumann, ten years Clara’s senior, there’s a shift in the dynamics of power, and the pubescent girl and Romantic roué fall in love, eventually marrying against her father’s menacing wishes. Midway in the story, Galloway, who has immersed herself in the diaries and letters of these characters to the point of surfeit (she sparks her decorative narrative with breathy exclamations and stream-of-consciousness questions), shifts into overdrive, discovering in Robert’s fits of ardor and despair a key to the tale that Clara’s own sober, diffident personality can’t provide. Brittle, compulsive, engorged on the idea of art for art’s sake—Dear God! Wasn’t Robert an artist, a Great Man?—Robert gradually loses his grip on reality, making it essential that Clara continue her dogged performances from Russia to England in order to keep their bloated household of seven children running. Liszt, Mendelssohn, Chopin, even Wagner waltz through the pages like Halloween trick-or-treaters, and the reader had better have at least a passing knowledge of musical history and composition. Do we ever learn whether Clara possesses true passion or just plays like a dutiful machine? In the end, Clara’s quest to be the Good Wife comes to naught as Robert is institutionalized, giving a sorrowful, nearly hollow note to Galloway’s wildly imagined tale of soured genius.
Still, the sound of Great Personalities clashing makes a rollicking good read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-84449-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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