An intimate drama of family secrets that moves at a compelling pace, yet leaves one wondering what all the fuss was about. On his deathbed Wesley DeLand asks his older daughter, Mira, to move a house—no small assignment logistically but an even greater task emotionally. It is Mira’s childhood home, dubbed “Lila” and long abandoned in North Carolina, that he wants her to relocate to Arkansas. Besides the more typical girlhood memories, Lila carries a few skeletons in the closet, carefully guarded from baby sister, Kat, who has never seen the house. When Wesley dies, Mira, Kat, and a moving crew journey to retrieve Lila (leaving brother Kearney nervously behind) and uncover the secrets of the house, inextricably bound with their dead mother, Helen. Appropriating the typically quirky features of the road-trip genre—the alarming shabbiness of motels, truck-stop buffets, and the occasional sighting of roadkill—the plot complicates as Mira drives her unsuspecting sister (who hopelessly worshiped their mother) closer to the truth. Before Kat was born, Helen conducted a shameless affair with the town’s minister, going so far as to share details at the dinner table and inviting him over, forcing Wesley to make himself scarce. After the affair ended, Helen insisted on moving and obliterating all mention of Lila. The terrible secret, exposed to the reader long before it is to Kat, plays a bit too southern gothic for the contemporary behavior of the characters, negating any sense of doom its imminent disclosure might create. Meantime, Mira develops an attraction to married Ray, the homespun honey in charge of the structural move, while Aron, the other driver, picks up a runaway and lets her tag along. Thrown in as well are a few revelations about Wesley (how the house got its name), providing a cathartic trip for his daughters, if not for the reader. A nicely written debut, but with little emotional punch.
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24409-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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