Still, despite its flaws: a refreshingly unsentimental story about people trying, not always successfully, to do what’s...
The popular Trollope (Marrying the Mistress, 2000, etc.) again deftly profiles ordinary men and women learning to adapt as their lives are disrupted by change and loss.
Life on the Meredith family’s two farms has been pretty predictable. They’re not the most beautiful spreads in England, but they’ve offered solace to Robin, who runs Tideswell, and younger brother Joe, along with parents Harry and Dilys, who farm Dean’s Place. But this seeming serenity is, as usual, only superficial. When Caro, Robin’s American wife, dies from a brain tumor, the thin fabric of the Merediths’ lives disintegrates. Judy, adopted daughter of Caro and Robin, is angry with her father because she feels he mistreated her mother, seeming cool and indifferent. Robin has his own sorrows, as well as financial worries, and Joe, long depressed, feels that with Caro gone he can no longer escape his demons. The pace of events accelerates when Zoe, a photographer who shares a flat with Judy in London, comes down for a weekend, then moves in and becomes Robin’s lover. Soon he’s telling her about his loveless marriage, and she’s also befriending Dilys—a friendship that comforts the crusty matriarch when Joe commits suicide, Harry has an accident, and all learn that they may have to leave the farm. Robin has large debts too (farming is not cheap), and Trollope makes a quiet, heartfelt plea for those who love the land and till it. The Merediths must adapt if they’re to survive, Dilys ruefully concludes: change, together with loss and growth, is life. This would all be more compelling if Caro and Zoe didn’t both seem more like necessary plot catalysts than memorable characters; Caro’s influence on the Merediths never becomes clear, and Zoe is a very sketchy figure.
Still, despite its flaws: a refreshingly unsentimental story about people trying, not always successfully, to do what’s right.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89999-2
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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