Skillfully crafted and drolly amusing, but Adams’s second novel never quite manages to marry its twin strings of downbeat...
Clueless teacher’s girlfriend dies, leading to much misery and soul-searching.
Mark Buckle isn’t really the kind of guy to believe in ghosts, prayer or the whole faith bit. A science teacher at an undistinguished school on the far, unattractive end of south London, Mark sticks to the basics: grousing internally about how crummy his life has been since his girlfriend Catherine died in a car accident. The fact that Catherine’s parents didn’t really like him anyway and that Mark appears to have next to no friends, save Felix, a fellow teacher, doesn’t help matters. Added to Mark’s woes is that Catherine keeps coming back to him, and not just in his dreams. The air in his apartment smells of her perfume, she materializes and speaks when nobody else is around, and every radio he’s near plays their song at the drop of a hat: “Never Tear Us Apart,” by INXS. The ghostly aspects of the tale here are as disconcerting to the reader as they are to Mark: this isn’t the way this kind of book is supposed to go. British author Adams (Tom, Dick, and Debbie Harry, 2002) starts things off with a typical loser’s lament from Mark—he narrates the whole affair—who goes on about his life in a downbeat, humorous, and self-deprecating sort of way. Adams has studied her Hornby well, writing an extremely believable male character from the inside out (something rarely attempted and even more rarely done well by female novelists). But when the other dimensions begin to intrude onto the narrative (which, true, isn’t much more than Mark mooning about and watching football with the extremely gay and, often, extremely drunk Felix), not just with Catherine but with the entrance of Tess, a born-again Christian with feelings for Mark, you start to feel as if you’ve been had.
Skillfully crafted and drolly amusing, but Adams’s second novel never quite manages to marry its twin strings of downbeat sarcasm and airy metaphysics.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32107-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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