Sharp observations don’t count for much beside such an unappealing protagonist.
The small world of Oliver Tate is detailed in this limp first novel by a young Welshman.
Oliver is almost 15, the only child of middle-class parents in Swansea, South Wales, and a self-absorbed smartass. His best friend is Chips, the school bully; he and Oliver make life such hell for a fat girl called Zoe that she’s forced to transfer. On a family vacation in Tuscany, he’s too busy tricking his father into rescuing him from a mock drowning to notice he’s in a foreign country. The story he narrates is sprinkled with diary entries and e-mails; brand names lend it a spurious reality. The first time he has sex it’s with his girlfriend Jordana in his parents’ bed. (The bed could use the action; the marriage of Oliver’s parents is going through a rough patch, and they haven’t had sex in months.) Oliver’s mother Jill goes to a meditation retreat run by an old friend, Graham, a New Age type who Oliver believes is bent on seducing her. He follows her there, planning an “intervention,” but comes off looking like a self-dramatizing jerk, in contrast to the calm, long-suffering adults. (This episode, and its later ramifications, are what you get to chew on in lieu of a plot.) He doesn’t manage any better with Jordana, whose mother is having an operation for a brain tumor. Jordana has become newly sensitive to those around her, a sensitivity Oliver has no use for; he ignores her in her hour of need, so naturally she dumps him. Then Zoe shows up, more attractive and many pounds lighter, and devises an ingenious payback. Poor Oliver; it’s just not fair. Is suicide the answer? He ends his story with a grandiose vision of his corpse being plucked from the ocean; the shot is all over the Internet and CNN. Any coming-of-age moment is still a long way off.
Sharp observations don’t count for much beside such an unappealing protagonist.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6683-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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