As usual Phillips writes up a storm (this time literally), but without a convincing story, readers may find themselves...
Phillips (English/Rutgers-Newark; MotherKind, 2000, etc.) divides her novel between July 1950, when a young soldier in the Korean War dreams about his unborn son, and July 1959, when that son, an orphaned hydrocephalic nine-year-old, is being raised by his older half sister and their aunt in West Virginia.
Basically blind, his language limited to the repetition of other people’s sentence endings, Termite is severely mentally and physically disabled, but Phillips gives him an active, if unconvincing inner life based on his sensitive hearing. Termite’s 17-year-old half sister Lark devotes herself to his care, a devotion based not on a sense of duty but on pure love. Raised by her Aunt Nonie, Lark has no memory of her mother Lola and no idea that her father is Charlie, who runs the restaurant where Nonie works. Years ago Nonie and Charlie were lovers. Then Nonie left for Atlanta. Charlie brought Lola to live with Nonie after their mother’s death and the three fell into a convoluted lovers’ triangle. Charlie moved back home, Lola had Charlie’s baby, Nonie moved home and, when Lark was three, Lola sent her to Nonie. Charlie and Nonie became lovers again but never married. Lola became a nightclub singer. She found unexpected happiness with a young clarinetist, Bobby Leavitt. They married and she was pregnant before he shipped overseas. Although Phillips returns repeatedly to the tunnel where Corporal Leavitt finds himself trapped trying to save a Korean girl and her brother from friendly fire, the novel’s heart lies with Lark. Phillips is not afraid of symbolism. Lark often carries Termite into a nearby tunnel. A mysterious ghostly, perhaps Christ-like young man appears bearing gifts and then disappears. A flood roars through town causing destruction and revealing hidden truths.
As usual Phillips writes up a storm (this time literally), but without a convincing story, readers may find themselves sinking into a marsh of sensory overload.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-40195-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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