Gardner's first short-fiction collection since The King's Indian (1974) offers ten highly polished stories—which, though generally unaffecting, do represent the range of his narrative imperatives. Here, as always, is Gardner-as-artist-philosopher, with clanging, derivative parables on the moral conflicts of the artist: the strained yet seductive title story, about a speech-making restaurant cook ("I'm an artist, you understand that? What's an artist? . . . An artist is a man who makes a covenant with tradition," etc.) whose esthetic need to cook a Vietnamese dog dish repels, then convinces the community; "The Problems of Art," an arch nouveau-Poe fable about a book-surrounded fellow seeing visions in his library ("I saw Ahab. . . who argued with Boswell's Dr. Johnson, boringly") while evading real-life demands (his father in the asylum); and the interminable "Vlemk the Box-Painter"—which stacks up no less than three conflicted artists, along with questions of reality (a painted face so real it talks), artistic honesty ("Is it our business to set down lies, or are we here to tell the Truth. . . ?"), inner and outer beauty. . . plus a fairy-tale format. Rather less numbing, though equally didactic and artist-centered, are Gardner's more realistic moral fables: in "Redemption," a boy, guilt-ridden over the accidental tractor-death of his brother, is drawn to music; in "Nimram," a world-famous conductor's complacency is shaken by an encounter with a terminally ill teenager. And Gardner comes closest to direct emotional appeal with two reminiscence-based stories (though again about art)—a dance school in 1940s St. Louis, a Welsh group-sing in upstate N.Y.—and with "The Joy of the Just": a folksy-comic yarn about the outlandish revenge of old Aunt Ella Reikert, who can't get the preacher to admit that his wife ran Aunt Ella off the road. True, none of these tales is less than skillful: Gardner's prose is smooth, musical, elaborate. But in most of them he seems to be writing far too much for his fellow artists, far too little for the world outside the ivory tower.
Pub Date: May 1, 1981
ISBN: 0679723501
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1981
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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