Brown's second novel returns to the hothouse milieu of his first (Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, 1994): a New Orleans full of familial tragedy and racial strife. And like the first, this somber tale rests on a burdensome secret, except that here things seem even more manufactured and implausible. In a voice that shifts from first to third person, Shelton Gerard Lafleur, an accomplished folk artist in his 70s, tells the oddly redemptive story of his life, one marked by a crippling fall from a tree at age eight. Before then, Shelton understood his mother to be the sweet, sickly white woman who spent most of her days in bed. What we come to learn is that the young black boy was purchased by a wealthy white man, Edward Soniat, to keep his dying daughter company. When Shelton falls from the tree, he's spirited to an orphanage, while the woman he believes to be his mother is told he's dead. Taking a vow of silence in the Depression-era institution, Shelton endures the abuse of the other boys, secure in his belief that he'll one day be returned to his family. But Miss Genevieve, the Soniats' nursemaid, has other plans. At 13, Shelton finds a patron of sorts in Minou Parrian, Miss Genevieve's son-in- law, a painter who pretends to be blind while sketching tourists in the French Quarter. Minou teaches Shelton his craft, both the art of drawing and the trickery of exploiting handicaps. The hyped-up drama of the novel comes from a sudden reversal, when Minou and Shelton change their roles as protector and protected. While Shelton finds strength and forgiveness with the revelation of his true parentage, Minou sets off on a mission of murderous revenge. The self-conscious play of imagery (light/dark, blindness/sight) is just one obvious aspect of Brown's overwrought and formulaic prose; his relentless sense of woe and despair is another. Retro southern fiction: Faulkner by way of the creative writing department.
Pub Date: April 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-72988-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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