The essence (which is all you need) of this profound and petty essay appears in 1978's Pushcart Prize collection (p. 220)—and an indisputable essence it is: what Arthur Miller so eloquently demands from drama, novelist Gardner demands from fiction—that it seek "to improve life, not debase it," that it "ought to be a force bringing people together, breaking down barriers of prejudice and ignorance, and holding up ideals worth pursuing." Who would argue with that?—or with Gardner's fervent defense of the model to be found in Homer, Dante, and Tolstoy: "the gods set ideals, heroes enact them, and artists. . . preserve the image as a guide for man." The pettiness and problems set in, however, when Gardner analyzes "what has gone wrong in recent years" with fiction and criticism—and in his formulas for how-to-do-it-right. Blaming the Freud-Sartre-Wittgenstein philosophical constellation for generating a cult of despair and nihilism, Gardner excoriates the writers who play games, manipulate, wallow in "texture," or ignore "eternal verities" for current causes—and he scorns the style-obsessed critics (his characterization here is caricature) who praise them. But, as Gardner disposes of one novelist after another—Walker Percy, Bellow ("sprawling works of advice, not art"), Didion, Heller, Updike—one gets the feeling that he's a bit too intent on eliminating the competition and that he's unable to see a moral lesson in any book that makes its point implicitly, indirectly, "accidentally," or with humor. (This suspicion is confirmed by the fact that Gardner's full praise is reserved for Fowles' Daniel Martin, which wears its lesson-in-living-ness on its sleeve). Narrower still—though fascinating—is Gardner's notion that True Art (the phrase becomes an incantation) can only be produced one way: "One begins a work of fiction with certain clear opinions. . . and one tests these opinions in lifelike situations," using an almost mystical "intuition" (the True Artist is heavily romanticized throughout). But, excessive and self-limited as Gardner's "rules" for moral fiction may be, they do illuminate the lousiness of much of today's writing, they do remind us of the viability of some centuries-old models, and they will provoke a good deal of healthily furious literary fisticuffs.
Pub Date: April 19, 1978
ISBN: 0465052266
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1978
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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