With unabashed echoes of all the great "river novels," from Huckleberry Finn to Heart of Darkness to The African Queen, Ballard (The Crystal World, Crash, Empire of the Sun) offers here a poetic, stately, oddly half-involving tale—part escape/chase adventure, part symbolic soul-journey. The narrator-seeker is British doctor Mallory, in charge of the WHO clinic at Port-la-Nouvelle in an unnamed nation "in the dead heart of the African continent," bordering on Chad and the Sudan. The area has been depopulated by the spreading Sahara desert, by civil war between government forces (vile) and Marxist guerrillas (worse). So, virtually without patients, Mallory has focused instead on a local engineering project, seemingly doomed: digging wells for irrigation. Obsessed, he refuses to leave Port-la-Nouvelle—despite a near-fatal encounter with the guerrillas, despite the obnoxious arrival of pathetic Prof. Sanger, a has-been purveyor of pop-science who's desperate to generate some sort of media-event for a TV documentary. And Mallory's mania escalates when, for unclear reasons (earthquake? wayward engineering?), a brand-new river appears precisely where Mallory has been digging! Mallory reacts to this quasi-miracle with wild ambivalence. He believes the river is his creation; he's soon referring to it as "the Mallory." Yet he now determines to destroy it—to follow it north to its source, to dam it up so that it irrigates the Sahara. (Or "was my attempt to scotch the river nothing more than the last installment of that suicide by easy payments on which I had embarked by first choosing to work at Port-la-Nouvelle?") Teaming up with 12-year-old Noon, a sometime girl-guerrilla, Mallory steals a ferry and sails upriver—chased via helicopter by reptilian Capt. Kagwa, whose beloved Mercedes limo (totem of his power-grabbing dreams) is on the ferry. Also in pursuit: feverish Prof. Sanger and his equally frail Indian sidekick; wildlife activist Nora Warrender, out to avenge the guerrillas' murder of her husband; plus, of course, the guerrillas themselves. And the ensuing action—boat collisions, copter attacks, exploding dams—is textured with Mallory's sporadic self-analysis. . .and with his increasingly erotic attachment to Noon, who seems to embody the traumatized spirit of native populations. Mallory's inner turmoil, with constant mood-shifts and philosophical flip-flops, is often more tiresome than compelling—and never connected to a credible psycho-portrait. The novel's mixture of tones—satiric, symbolic, derring-do-ish—doesn't quite ignite. Still, if rather murky in overall thrust, chapter by chapter this is rich, strange work from a distinctive storyteller: elegantly phrased, vividly imagined, and rescued from portentousness by a deeply ironic tilt.
Pub Date: April 1, 1988
ISBN: 0312421281
Page Count: -
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
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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