Soap opera, but a pretty good one, with a feel for the era (the ’70s), and a nicely satisfying end.
A debut novel by poet Bialosky (Wanting a Child, 1998) about a young woman’s attempt to come to terms with her unhappy childhood.
Anna Crane is going to be married. That’s enough to make anyone wistful, but Anna has another reason to be jittery: The wedding will be in her hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where she hasn’t set foot since she basically ran away from home decades ago. A middle child, Anna was the second daughter of Lilly and Lawrence Crane, a happy Russian-Jewish couple from Cleveland. Lawrence was a builder who made good money during the housing boom of the 1950s and settled his family in a beautiful home far removed from the grit of midwestern city life—but died suddenly in 1961 while changing a light bulb. Lilly’s grief knew no bounds: Not only had she lost her husband, she found herself thrown on the mercy of in-laws who considered her beneath Lawrence in the first place. With no intention of working, Lilly began cultivating men the way gardeners do plants, finally marrying the rich but unpleasant (and gentile) Max McCarthy. Anna puts up with her mother’s flirtatious ways better than her older sister Ruthie—who goes to live with her aunt after her mother remarries—but that’s partly because Anna feels she has more to learn than her sister. For some time, after all, the teenaged Anna has been obsessing over Austin Cooper, a hapless but handsome classmate who has dropped out of school to work as a stablehand. An ignoramus and a gambler, Austin is the wrong man for Anna, but she falls for him in the hopeless style of the young and becomes pregnant. Meanwhile, Lilly, who has been telling Anna what she must do to “win” Austin, seems to be taking an interest in him herself.
Soap opera, but a pretty good one, with a feel for the era (the ’70s), and a nicely satisfying end.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-15-100685-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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