The US debut of a meganovel of the Old South by American expatriate Green, begun in 1934, put aside when Gone With the Wind appeared, completed in the 1980's and very successfully published- -more than 650,000 copies sold, we're told—in 1987 in Europe. The life and loves of beautiful Elizabeth Escridge, the 16- year-old English girl who comes to stay with her wealthy Hargrove cousins when her aristocratic father dies, are chronicled at a pace as languorous and enervating as a summer's day at Dinwood plantation, the Hargroves' Georgia home. Set in the years 1850-52, the possibility of war with the North is a pervasive subtext and handy dinner-party topic useful for alarming assembled guests and teaching Elizabeth more Southern history. Meanwhile, there are oblique hints of family secrets and plantation mysteries: a fatal fire in Haiti, where the Hargroves once lived; a forbidden wood of the damned; and a resident Welshwoman who terrifies them all. Elizabeth, at first homesick, soon adjusts and falls in love with notorious Jonathan Armstrong, whom she barely speaks to but just knows she loves, as he does her, though he nevertheless marries wealthy Creole and former prostitute Annabel. Then, when wealthy Uncle Charlie from Savannah takes her to Virginia, Elizabeth falls in love with and marries his son Ned. Naturally, it can't and doesn't end well: Ned and Jonathan kill each other in a duel; Elizabeth bears a son of debated paternity; and the War between the States draws closer. The Distant Lands is no Gone With the Wind, no matter how many mint juleps and magnolias fill its pages. Too melodramatic, too stiff, with a heroine sans any redeeming panache or intelligence: a readable but less-than-riveting tome whose transatlantic popularity says more about them than us.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-7145-2909-5
Page Count: 902
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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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