British author Blackburn (the nonfiction Daisy Bates in the Desert, 1994) offers the same wonder, vividness, and bravura of her dazzling The Book of Color (1995), if not always also that novel’s laser-like simplicity. It must be a sign when a mermaid, in 1410, is washed ashore near a small village in England. Even though she’s gone before the man who discovers her can run to the village and back (only a lock of her hair remains), her appearance is foreboding, and “people waited with growing apprehension for what might follow.” All of this, and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that does in fact follow, is observed by a narrator of whom we know nothing except that she has lost a lover, has come to this village, and with a tender, never judgmental eye now observes its inhabitants—including the red-haired girl; the local priest; the person who remembers The Great Pestilence; the woman who sees devils; the pregnant Sally, whose fisherman husband dies at sea after discovering the mermaid; and the shoemaker’s wife, who sees her husband through blindness, then a miraculous cure, then a gratefully painless death. So it is that, halfway through the book, for one reason or another, a small handful sets out for Jerusalem, led by the priest and by the leper who appeared on the day of the mermaid, left behind a book about the Holy Land, then later reappeared, miraculously cured. Events and people both can be hard to keep straight in this shiftingly Under Milkwood—esque reconstruction of what it may have been like to be medieval, but vividness, image, and detail only intensify, then intensify yet again, through the suffering-filled voyage to Jerusalem, the visionary torments and joys experienced there, and the sobered return (though only of the priest and the invisible teller of the tale) to faraway home. Difficult, ambitious, demanding—and exquisitely, unendingly, depthlessly beautiful both in matter and manner, to be read not just once.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-43984-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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