The “mystery” here reflects larger truths and keeps pages turning, but the texture, character and observation Williams gives...
Sharp and funny rock ’n’ roll elegy to youth and a disappearing way of life as Wales joins Europe’s shiny future.
Unfolding simultaneously in 1980 and 1999, the story continues Williams’s fond and vivid portrait of Cardiff, last seen in his collection Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub (1999), this time with the tale of the Wurriyas, a one-hit ska band. After nearly 20 years, ex-Wurriyas guitarist (and womanizer—art students and “little Goth girls” mostly) Mazz, approaching 40, returns to Cardiff, where his career began. While Mazz toured with second-billed bands, erstwhile singer Bobby, now a lesbian pimp, bassist Tyra, now a single mom, and guitarist Col all remained, as did Charlie Unger, drummer, local character, washed-up prizefighter, and Tyra’s absentee dad, whose death brings them all together again. In 1980, with Bobby Sands’s hunger strike in the background, the band went from local pubs to a brief moment in the spotlight, while Mazz and Tyra fell in love. When Tyra ended a pregnancy, though, they gave up as the band fell apart. In 1999, Mazz and Tyra, both lonely and aware of their age, fall together as they pursue the odd circumstances of Charlie’s death. Scarily thuggish but goodhearted Jason Flaherty, once the Wurriyas’s manager, is now a real-estate developer riding high on Cardiff’s building boom, which is turning the gritty docks and pubs of the Wurriyas’s heyday into a touristy waterfront mall. He pays Mazz to find the band’s drummer Emyr, who has famously disappeared but was seen with Charlie shortly before his death. While making a go of it with Tyra, Mazz tours the surfing beaches of Wales, where rumor places Emyr, and uncovers the heartless real-estate maneuvering that led to the death of Charlie (and the Cardiff he once knew).
The “mystery” here reflects larger truths and keeps pages turning, but the texture, character and observation Williams gives us are by themselves captivating and rewarding enough.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-145-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
