Thanks to a fairly conventional thriller format, Oates' newest attempt to make feverish myth out of supposed American prototypes is far more manageable—if no more successful—than the rambling excesses of Bellefleur: it's a Washington, D.C. retelling of Aeschylus' Oresteia which tries, vaguely, to hook up the themes of personal betrayal and revenge with the politics of treason and terrorism. Maurice Halleck, Director of the (imaginary) Federal Commission for the Ministry of Justice, is dead in an apparent car-crash suicide following a bribery scandal (connected to investigations into the Allende affair). But Maurice's high-strung teenage daughter Kirsten is convinced that her father was murdered—for domestic and perhaps political reasons—by chic mother Isabel and her lover Nicholas Martens, Maurie's old pal and colleague at the Commission. So, fixed on a double revenge-killing, Kirsten/Electra hysterically demands active support from low-key older brother Owen—an undergraduate who (in a totally implausible sequence) rinds his half-hearted commitment to matricide becoming politicized into manic revolutionary bloodlust, via seduction by an elegant, homosexual gum of international terrorism. ("Our acts are to confirm justice. . . . They will not be acts of personal vengeance—we've gone beyond that.") And meanwhile Oates provides flashback background on the Maurie/isabel/Nick triangle: young Nick saving schoolmate Maurie's life on a canoeing trip; the philosophical split between pragmatist Nick (handsome, popular) and idealist Maurie (monkey-faced, a loner); the routine guilts of the adultery and subsequent deceit. But the relationships and motivations remain unlifelike and murky—as does the significance of the political corruption (Nick's) which becomes entangled with personal betrayal. And the limp attempt to weight the Kirsten/Owen conspiracy with revolutionary politics (Oates makes them descendants of John Brown, quasi-terrorist hero) is merely longwinded, with pages of terrorism rhetoric and data. Finally, then, there's only the melodrama of the revenge—Kirsten seduces and nearly kills Nick, Owen kills Isabel ("Bitch. Cunt. Murderer. Mother") and others, kamikaze-style—followed by the clearing of Maurie's name by a transformed, reclusive Nick. True, Oates' prose, though slack and repetitive, is generally readable this time around. And occasional glimmers of issues worth exploring ("What a person is in secret, he becomes—in politics") do surface. But once again it seems as if Oates catches a glimpse of a thematic construct, then throws words at it from all directions—with blurry, inflated, and uninvolving results.
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 1981
ISBN: 0517421852
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1981
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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