Some laughs, but very much the same old.
Five-time Emmy-nominated screenwriter (Late Night with David Letterman, etc.) debuts with a lackluster Sex and the City clone.
Ruby Capote is a Boston columnist whose beat is the woe of single women. She oughta know: Her silly boyfriend Doug collects the little plastic thingies from bread bags and calls his purple Porsche “The Grape.” Hoping to move on, Ruby sends tear sheets and a six-pack to the editor of the New York News, handsome Michael Hobbs, who eventually assigns her to the men-are-scum beat. He oughta know: he’s quasi-engaged to a beauty, but obviously eager to hook up with Ruby, whose new circle of friends offers plenty of material. Amoral and gorgeous model Skorka prefers married men—they don’t get attached and never leave their socks lying around. Jenn is an overworked factotum for a manically demanding media personality. Lily’s never had much luck with men—is she a lesbian? Divorced Danielle just dumped her 23-year-old swain after discovering he’s the son of a previous lover. And so on, through mildly comedic matters that include a vagina visualization workshop á la Eve Ensler—but Ruby has other things on her mind and can’t imagine what her vagina would say or wear (if it could). Doug’s been offered a job in New York, but that relationship is totally over, even though the clueless chump doesn’t think so. A hallway flirtation and subsequent fling with a sexy neighbor, TV exec Tom, goes nowhere, which leaves only Michael, but he’s her boss. Obligatory forays are taken into Ruby’s past: the car crash that killed her alcoholic father; the adolescent crush she had on her shrink. These alone may not explain why her relationships with men are difficult, but when she finds out Michael’s dark secret, she’s ready to believe that men really are scum. The girlfriends concur, though Ruby makes up her own mind in the end.
Some laughs, but very much the same old.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50514-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
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
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