A nice soapy title for a nice soapy Krantz: the author’s usual up-market labels mixed with a little mother-daughter drama and some heart-wrenching terminal illness. Tessa Kent, born Teresa Horvath, becomes a big-time movie star at age 16, two years after giving birth to a daughter, Maggie, whom Tessa’s devoutly Catholic parents bring up as Tessa’s little sister. Tessa would tell Maggie the truth about her birth if her parents weren—t against it, and she—d do it again, later, if her career weren—t so demanding. And yet again later, except that she meets the love of her life, Luke Blake, a billionaire Australian for whom Tessa’s virginity is very, very important. (Happily for Tessa, the doctors sewed her back up after delivery: in Judith Krantz, all things are possible.) By the time Luke has finally died and Tessa is ready to spill the beans, Maggie (now 18) has learned the truth on her own and severed all connection to her family. She takes her small savings to Manhattan, rents a room with a motherly lesbian who paints miniature portraits, and goes to work for a prestigious auction house. When Tessa discovers she has an incurable cancer and not long to live, she resolves to win back her daughter’s love; to do so, she offers her world-famous collection of jewelry for auction, on the condition that Maggie will spend six months with her, publicizing the sale. As a teenager, Tessa bought her first pearls at Tiffany’s, but it was Luke who really taught her the way around a precious stone, buying her huge emeralds, diamonds, and rubies and sometimes covering her body with them while he made love to her. By the close, it’s Maggie’s own pregnancy that will finally bring the two women together. Not as much of a tear-jerker as one might expect, but with lots of Krantz’s signature glamour. (Literary Guild main selection and Doubleday Book Club; TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60309-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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