From the author of the recently acclaimed biography Daisy Bates in the Desert (1994) comes a first novel of beauty and accomplishment, its subject of racial fear and intolerance drawn from Blackburn's own family history. The story is a saga of guilt and suffering that has its start late in the 19th century when a missionary from England comes to an island near Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, ``to stamp out copulation'' (as his son later puts it). What he actually stamps out, however, is the happiness of his family and descendants: The first victim is his own wife, whom he drives cruelly to madness after discovering her having sex with an island native; then there's his own guilt-driven son, suspected of having black blood, who nevertheless echoes his father by taking up a repressive ministry and returning to England; and finally, there's his son, who carries the family's color-guilt and madness deep into the 20th century. The tale itself, however, is only the skeleton of sorrow upon which Blackburn hangs the woven beauties of her own telling of it. Every bit as important as what things happen when are the author's wondrous shifts in time and her deft and inventive intertwinings of image, symbol, and character as they do. Imagine a narrator going into a house in the company of a rather friendly pig; coming upon the narrator's astonishingly old grandfather there; then sitting under a table with the pig as it casually eats a leatherbound book. From one recurring detail to another (the pigor one like it, in earlier timeis the lonely grandfather's boyhood pet), Blackburn evokes the world of 19th-century Mauritius, of 20th-century England, and the terrible sorrows of repression, loneliness, slavery, madness, and lossall with a deftness, confidence, and magic that, by making it joyful, raise tragedy to its uttermost. A rare, wonderful achievement in the novel.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43983-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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