Skillfully handled, each generation having its own clear voice and time. A marvelous and provocative piece of American
Family history as a double helix of white and black reaching back across three troubled generations: a densely layered saga
and remarkable debut. At the end of the Civil War, Vermonter Norman Pelham lies wounded in a Virginia field until he’s revived by the green-eyed African-American girl Leah, and between the two more than a spark of attraction is kindled. They walk back to his family farm together, arriving as husband and wife, and begin a life there secure in their love but knowing that not everyone looks favorably on their union. In time, three children are born, two daughters first, then, much later, a son, but Leah’s past comes back to haunt her. Before meeting Norman, when she fled North Carolina and the teenaged son of her owner/father, whom she thought she’d killed as he attempted to rape her, she also left her mother behind. Now, years of not knowing what happened to her force Leah to go home. She returns to Vermont in less than a week, silent and grim, and shortly thereafter hangs herself in Norman's woods, taking her secret with her. Jamie, her five-year-old son, grows up having to endure taunts about his heritage and his mother and, embittered, leaves the farm at the first opportunity, making a place for himself in the resorts of the White Mountains as a bar manager and supplier of moonshine. But when Prohibition raises the stakes, organized competition first toys with him, then takes him for a one-way ride. He leaves behind 16-year-old Foster, lover of bird dogs, who discovers letters written to Jamie from his sisters back in Vermont, and, when Foster visits them, learns the secret of his blood, then finally, in North Carolina, comes to see the root of the evil that drove his grandmother to take her life.
Skillfully handled, each generation having its own clear voice and time. A marvelous and provocative piece of AmericanPub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87113-765-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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