An upsetting, affecting novel about an attempt to understand trauma.
A young woman grapples with a long history of sexual abuse in this debut novel.
In Montreal in 1967, 16-year-old Rose’s family has a secret: Her father has been molesting her for years. “I had always been compliant because he had enslaved me at such a young age,” writes Rose as an adult, looking back. “I knew nothing else and until a few years earlier I hadn’t known how wrong this was. Stepford child. Once under his control, I believed I was complicit.” She now manages to avoid her father’s abuse, but she still can’t bring herself to tell her mother about it—although she suspects that she already knows. Rose later goes to college, where she channels her rage into radical politics and drug experimentation. A boyfriend suspects that she’s been abused, although she can’t talk to him about it, either. With the benefit of time—and years of therapy—an adult Rose recounts her story, interspersing her current thoughts between her memories. Other pieces of information are revealed, such as how her father forced her and her brother, Tom, to engage in sexual acts; and how her father had other victims, outside the family, who contacted her later—sometimes in an accusatory manner. As Rose tries to uncover the full scope of what happened to her, Nadler leaps between present and past—featuring Rose the character and Rose the investigator. It results in a fragmented text that effectively suggests the simultaneity of trauma and memory. Chapters are separated by lists, poems, short vignettes, and other items that feel pulled straight from a diary; Nadler’s prose also displays a strong preference for staccato sentences, as well as dramatic imagery: “I was relegated to the back rooms of [my mother’s] consciousness. The back rooms where cigars were smoked and poker played. The back rooms where shady deals were made. Where she would never go.” Although this stylistic choppiness does become overwhelming, at times the book’s sheer emotional weight offers a powerful reading experience.
An upsetting, affecting novel about an attempt to understand trauma.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2498-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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