Unparalleled in voice yet a bit lost in the big room of the novel—as if its pieces were looking for corners to hide in,...
Hecht’s first novel, after her glorious stories (Do the Windows Open?, 1997), is both treat and trial for lovers of her earlier fiction.
Here is the same voice as before, of the smartly independent but neurasthenic (unhappy and in analysis forever) narrator who summers in Nantucket and is so wonderfully opinionated about Americans and their society as to raise the ghost of Mencken, chortling delightedly (who else writing today would say, or be able to say, that “I [gave] up socializing with the dull, and then had to give up socializing altogether”?). For those whose brains are still alert with skepticism in this drugged and latter-day age, the voice is tough, spiky, funny, and refreshing—even if its possessor is “a hollowed-out woman without a soul” and does fixate on “emptiness and nothingness.” It’s a voice honest, rigorous, and engaging—but Hecht’s novel just doesn’t provide it with a story that can come up to its level. Here again appears “the world renowned reproductive surgeon” Arnold Loquesto, cold and dour. Now, it’s his college-age son the narrator is friends with, having met him years earlier and still in an intense telephone friendship with him. The two are wonderfully simpatico, and the usual Hechtian sparks fly as they converse and complain (“His whole life, I realized, was made up of these last two crummy decades. No wonder he was cynical and discouraged . . .”) about everything from dumb song titles to aging hippies who wear gray-hair ponytails. The crux is that the boy, raised by dysfunctional parents in a dysfunctional age, is actually a heroine addict—and that, as a result, something dreadful happens. If only the reader could feel for the boy even a quarter of the intensity the narrator does, there’d be weight galore to go with all this wit—but the book tacks without ballast to its half-lost ending.
Unparalleled in voice yet a bit lost in the big room of the novel—as if its pieces were looking for corners to hide in, brilliantly. (For an excerpt of The Unprofessionals go to www.kirkusreviews.com.)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6174-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
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
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