Yet another rich, rewarding novel from Britain's acclaimed Crace (Arcadia, 1992, etc.), this set in an 1830s English coastal town where an early winter storm brings unexpected visitors and, for some, unsettling complications. The people of Wherrytown wake up to find a Yankee ship, the Belle of Wilmington, mastless and stuck in the sand outside their harbor. At the same time, the coastal steamer on its regular run has brought to town Aymer Smith, a London soap-maker whose liberal views and pedantic manner soon put off everyone he meets. He's come in person to inform area soda-ash suppliers, and his firm's agent, that their services are no longer needed; but when the American crewcomplete with the captain's injured black slavecome to the inn where Aymer's also lodging, he awakens to a new sense of purpose. He sets the African free, and, flushed with thoughts of the blushing bride whom the inn's overcrowding has forced to share his room (with her husband), thinks to end his long bachelorhood by marrying the teenaged daughter of one of his ash suppliers. Aymer's humane gestures are not welcome, however, as the slave's owner assaults him, and his intended quickly makes clear her preference for a Yankee sailor, planning to go off with him when the Belle is seaworthy. Floated off the sand and ready after a week's frantic repair, the ship sails with her rowdy crew, the sailor's girl, the newlyweds as emigrants to Canada, and even the ship's dog, which had adopted Aymer and become his only friend. A last visit for consolation to the girl's mother, now alone, results instead in the loss of his virginity, leaving him a changed man when he returns to the city. Human nature in all its tangled glory is quietly but powerfully evoked, along with a tangy, lasting impression of the intricate life of those who dwell between land and sea.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-26379-5
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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