Familiar themes for a gay novel, but Weir conveys them inventively and effectively.
A gay scholar meditates on a lifetime of losses and humiliations both before and during the age of AIDS.
This second novel by Weir (The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, not reviewed) is set during a single day in 2000: Tom, a 40-something community-college English teacher and novelist living in New York, is roped into joining his childhood friend Richie as he meets an Internet acquaintance for a date. This small event provokes a cascade of memories for Tom, most of them deeply melancholic: the sad, slow death of his friend Zack as he succumbed to AIDS, the insults and worse from his classmates and teachers in high school who publicly berated him for being (or at least seeming) gay, his complicated emotional and sexual relationship with his friend Ava. Many of Tom’s remembrances are of being a gay man in the ’80s, which inevitably makes this novel at least partly an AIDS elegy—as Weir writes, “we didn’t have much of a context except illness and death.” But despite its title, and despite the fact that Tom is the contemplative and moody sort, this book is never burdened by a somber, self-pitying tone. If anything, Tom’s main torment—the crush he has on Justin, a young, handsome and talented student—brings energy and a feeling of optimism to the story. Weir’s finest achievement is the way he connects disparate events to create a sort of emotional synthesis—as when a trip to Herman Melville’s grave with Justin segues into Zack’s final days, and a stop at Richie’s apartment gives way to a memory of a high-school beating. Individually, they’re just scraps of events; woven together, they become revelatory passages on the wounds each of the characters bear, and on what gives them the strength to move their lives forward.
Familiar themes for a gay novel, but Weir conveys them inventively and effectively.Pub Date: March 27, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03484-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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