A flat, unsurprising record of one day in the life of various gay men in 1981 Los Angeles. Rechy (Our Lady of Babylon, 1996, etc.) has apparently set out to recover something of the blithe, libidinal spirit of homosexual life in America at the moment when the gay community was enjoying a new-found and assertive presence—and before some aspects of its identity were altered or erased by the onset of AIDS. He does so by following a variety of figures through a day when the Santa Ana winds are blowing—arousing, as more than one character remarks, an uneasy, restless, persistent yearning for sex. The characters include a troubled couple, struggling to overcome ennui and mistrust to stay together; a bright, staid middle-aged man, both envious—and resentful—of the freedom heedlessly enjoyed by a younger generation never exposed to police raids and public loathing; a bodybuilder who suffers a series of romantic pratfalls; a young man beginning, painfully, to suspect that he’s gay; a teenaged hustler scornfully working the boulevards; and a wealthy, worldly man who’s fled an act of violence in Manhattan, only to find that a different kind of mortality seeks him out in la-la land. Also wandering about the city is a trio of thugs, uncertain of their own sexual orientation and looking for gays to assault. There’s a substory involving the intermittently comic efforts of a drag queen to produce a private stage version of a porn film for a wealthy patron and his cronies. Many of the plot strands culminate in a Los Angeles park at night, when several of the gay characters collide with the thugs. The encounter, however—though heavily foreshadowed’seems more of an afterthought than a climax. The characters are rather sketchily drawn, the plot is thin: the result is a novel that, while vivid and sometimes very droll, is more an X-rated reverie than a sustained narrative.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1650-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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