There will always be innocents wandering about in the worst places abroad, and most of them will always be Americans, like the two described here by Ciment (The Law of Falling Bodies, 1993). The Melanesian island of Vanduu is about as far off the map as you can fall. Dropped somewhere in between the Philippines and Indonesia, it’s primitive, remote, and not exactly part of the tourist circuit. Blessed with beautiful beaches, a tropical climate, a mishmash of competing religions, and a pre-modern culture, it could offer a good holiday to a sybaritic anthropologist, however, and that probably explains why Thomas Strauss is there. A renowned American scholar of erotic rituals, Thomas visits Vanduu with his wife, Helene. Nearly 30 years his junior, Helene’s an ex-stripper who became Thomas’s guide to the sexual netherworlds he wrote about before marrying her. In Vanduu, they meet Adam Finster, an American expatriate who makes a living selling love potions—pheronome perfumes—to the locals. Adam tries to show Thomas and Helene the “real” Vanduu, but after he seduces the sexually starved Helene, she flees him and goes off with Thomas on their own. This proves to be a big mistake when Thomas kills a native boy in a car accident and later dies of a heart attack, leaving Helene to face the prospect of a manslaughter trial on her own. Unwilling to subject herself to the vagaries of Vanduuan justice, she turns fugitive and tries to flee the country secretly. To succeed, she needs the help of someone steeped in the local customs, and she knows no one in Vanduu but Adam. Can he be trusted to get her out of this mess? Somewhat formulaic and too self-consciously rough (—He cupped her breast like a man cups a handful of cherished water—). But a good read—told with real style in the best Graham Greene manner.
Pub Date: March 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-517-70202-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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