An ingenious dramatization of the turbulent thoughts of a four-year-old boy makes something special of this otherwise somewhat contrived tale of the consequences of an interracial love affair—the fifth novel from the ambitious Scott (The Manikin, 1996, etc.). Young “Bo” is saved by his seat belt in the automobile accident that kills his mother Jenny Templin and sends him to live with his black grandparents, the Gilberts, whose youngest son Kamon, a high school student and Jenny’s lover, had also been killed, by robbers fleeing the scene of their crime, before their later son’s birth. We learn all this and more in fragments, as Scott juxtaposes scenes observed and only partially understood by Bo with extended passages of omniscient narration that move forward and backward in time, tracing Jenny’s estrangement from her own mother, Marge, and the latter’s stiff-necked, religious second husband Eddie Gantz; Kamon’s growing devotion to Jenny and hopeful plans for their future—then, after both are gone and Marge understands the extent of her loss, the custody struggle that takes Bo away from the indulgent Erna and Sam Gilbert and into the orbit of the demanding Eddie Gantz, whose disciplinarian fury erupts during one unhappy Thanksgiving Day. The tactic of revisiting the same event from varying perspectives works superbly, forcing us to keep reconsidering our judgments of these understandably inner-directed, highly fallible people. And Scott creates some wonderful effects with Bo’s limited viewpoint (“he kept running away from Marge and Eddie because he understood it to be a wonderful game . . . “) and embryonic perceptions (his “meeting” with a fox seen prowling near the Gilberts’ car vividly illustrates the range of even a very young child’s muscular imagination). A risk-taking book, unafraid to court sentimentality and melodrama in an effort to show how profoundly well-meaning people can unintentionally shatter one another’s lives. Scott just keeps getting better.
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-77616-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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BOOK REVIEW
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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BOOK REVIEW
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