From the hokey title to the sentimental insight of the last line, McInerney's latest yuppie melodrama (Brightness Falls, 1992, etc.) at best recalls the social-climbing novels of John O'Hara. More often, his glittering narrative is bedecked with the baubles of cheap fiction: rich people, raw sex, drugs, booze, and fame. Part of McInerney's problem lies in his narrator, a creepy arriviste who's self-conscious about his failings, but never to the point of actually repudiating his shallow self. Now a middle-aged lawyer at a ``white-shoe firm'' (as he says more often than necessary), Patrick Keane first met his ``legendary'' friend, Will Savage, in 1965, at a New England prep school where the two roomed together. The last in a line of debauched and dysfunctional southerners, Savage displays all the self-assured recklessness of a rich kid who couldn't care less about SATs or fitting in. Rather, since it's the '60s, he cultivates his outlaw pose, reading the Beats, practicing Buddhism, digging the blues, and cruising the black neighborhoods of his native Memphis. Savage takes the fall for one of Patrick's prep school indiscretions, and thereafter Patrick serves as liaison to Will's screwed-up, right-wing family, though he can't prevent Will from marrying his longtime sweetheart, Taleesha Johnson, the niece of a prominent bluesman. Unbowed, Savage becomes a fabulously wealthy and successful record producer. Patrick, meanwhile, with a Park Avenue apartment, a nice wife and two kids, becomes a partner in his law firm and struggles to make sense of his own conflicted sexuality. McInerney's facile reconstructing of history allows Patrick to discover a pre-Bellum Savage family memoir that explains their entire racial history, and, as the years hurtle by, McInerney continues to blunder through time, repeatedly taking pratfalls in passages of oily writing. Fiction for those who wouldn't be caught dead with Collins, Steel, et al. but want the same greasy splendor.
Pub Date: May 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42845-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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