Both those familiar and those unfamiliar with Fanon’s work are likely to be bemused by this strange potpourri.
The noted African-American author pays homage to psychiatrist/activist Frantz Fanon, best known for his anti-colonial classic The Wretched of the Earth, in this quasi-fictional meditation that incorporates bits of Wideman’s own history.
Wideman has been mulling over his “Fanon project” for years; see the story “Fanon” in the collection God’s Gym (2005). He is evidently looking for a way in which he and his alter ego Thomas, the book’s protagonist, can connect to the transcendent spirit of the black Frenchman, who died in 1961, and have that spirit infuse the African-American struggle against racism. First things first though. A severed head is delivered by UPS to Thomas, who is writing Fanon’s biography. The head is accompanied by a note, a quote from one of Fanon’s works. Is it Fanon’s head, magically restored? Is the author playing head games? Thomas eventually tosses it in the river, but the questions linger disquietingly. Wideman makes the most direct connection between Fanon and Homewood, the Pittsburgh ghetto where Wideman grew up, when he juxtaposes Fanon’s questioning (in his role as psychiatrist) of two Algerian boys, accused killers, with an imaginary Homewood teenager who in the blink of an eye becomes a murder victim. The Homewood teenager is memorialized by an old lady, possibly Wideman’s mother, in a monologue that is a small miracle; nothing else equals its intensity. Wideman also conjectures that his mother had some tenuous contact with Fanon in the Bethesda, Md., hospital where Fanon died; as for his life, there are only snippets, sure to puzzle the uninitiated. Sometimes Fanon appears tangentially. At other times he disappears altogether as Wideman/Thomas riff on current highs and lows, prompting the cry: “This thinking all fine and dandy but it’s not the book…” No indeed.
Both those familiar and those unfamiliar with Fanon’s work are likely to be bemused by this strange potpourri.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-94263-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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