By the author of the arresting Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger (1990): a Marty-themed, whimsical novel with flashes of bright fantasy and high hilarity—all about two losing loners who find each other—and love. The story begins with the death of retired hardware-store owner Atlas Malone—no simple affair, involving as it does greetings, conversing with, and digging the message of a most familiar angel. Here, dying is a far from peaceful matter—whether in the Malone preserves, where live Atlas's wife Gracie and horribly disfigured son Louis, or in the Intensive Care Unit of the local hospital, where toils short, squat, unlovely Iris. Take one long-term patient, the dying comatose Tube Man who will speak—one ghostly word at a time. Then there's the town undertaker, who grabbed a gold ring after dying—for a reason having to do with an old dirty deed. Another wrongdoer will show up in the hospital, the ever-drunk Harvey, a link to Louis because Harvey had shared a transcendent moment with Louis 16 years before, when the teen-age and then handsome Louis had yet to be disfigured by the fire Harvey claims he set. Of course, Louis, a recluse these many years, always encased in a scarf and hat, and Iris the lowly and lonely, do get together—but it's only after Louis's plummet (or was it an ascension?) from a second-story window and a gathering of the world as represented by the neighbors who accompany him in a loud caravan to the hospital. Then, while Iris and Louis heed the incredible summons to love, Gracie and Iris's tottery father also pair off. An attractive flight into romance's more fabulous dimension- -but whether or not the fantastic palls, the ructions and crackings wise by the nurses laboring at incredible machines and patients are a fascination and delight. Cohen continues to bemuse and entertain.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-446-51534-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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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