Religious hysteria provides the focus for one of Oates' least powerful, most monotonic and glutinous explorations of the fevered mind. Nathanael Vickery is a child born of violence, son of a teen-age rape victim, raised by a Jesus-loves-me grandmother and an atheist doctor grandfather in the Forties near the Chautauqua Mountains. Grandma Opal croons about this special, God-touched baby, "He knows all there is to know," and sure enough, by the time Nathanael can walk and talk, he's seeing visions and getting personal whispered endorsements from Jesus: "The inhabitants of the world cannot touch you. . . . For you are of the same substance as I—you are not like other men." A splashy career in evangelism is inevitable for this child prodigy with his "rare powers of preaching and healing and prophesy," but Nathanael's cynical grandpa (soon dead of a stroke) is the least of the pubescent preacher's problems: he is prone to Pride—Jesus forces him to get humble by chewing on a live chicken—and, above all, Lust, in the person of Leonie Beloff, daughter of Rev. Beloff the Radio & TV Evangelist. Nathanael succumbs to this Lust, sort of, so he must be punished—on a live Good Friday telecast, he gouges his eye with a paring knife (as in "if thine eye offend thee," etc.). Strangely enough, this crazy gesture merely boosts Nathanael's Pentecostal ministry, and in the Sixties he's the Master of the Seekers for Christ and just about convinced that he is Jesus himself (a problem, because "If I am Christ, then who will save me?"). But in 1974 comes a final vision/breakdown, leaving Nathanael the quasi-schizophrenic whose voice we hear praying off and on through this book—a work which heats up every now and then with Oates' infectious relish for dark thoughts and deeds, but which leans on her most unlovely trademarks—sloppily wrought-up language, fuzzily pretentious thematics—at unflattering length.
Pub Date: July 28, 1978
ISBN: 0575026715
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Vanguard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1978
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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