Of interest to fans who have followed the story through the first two books, but a bumpy ride without that background.
What are you going to do after vanquishing the virals? Why, properly inoculated, refound civilization, of course.
Marilynne Robinson isn’t the only writer to situate a woman named Lila in the green groves of Iowa. Nope: Cronin (The Twelve, 2012, etc.) does so too, his Lila a warden to damaged young Kate, whose biblically named mom, Sara, has been shunted off into captivity by the Redeyes, unpleasant people made that way by genetic tinkering via the virals—they being, readers of Cronin’s predecessor volumes will recall, supersoldiers gone awry thanks to inevitable screw-ups on the parts of the mad scientists at Monsanto, or wherever mad scientists find work in these fraught times. Leave it to Amy, Alicia of Blades, Peter the martyred rock on which the future is founded (“Blood was dripping from his hair, flowing down the creases of his face”), and all the other good guys to hack and slash their ways across the landscape to the promised land of Ottumwa, or wherever it is that good guys make their ways to in the very bad near future. Cronin writes with intelligence and verve, and he serves up a good imitation of Sergio Leone: “Of Amy, the Girl from Nowhere,” he writes in a denouement, “there is no mention. Perhaps we shall never learn who she was, if she existed at all.” That there’s anyone to worry about literary archaeology 1,000 years after events means that humankind survived, so yea, but only after much gore and heroic talk befitting an apocalyptic yarn. Some of the story seems castoff Walter Miller, whose Canticle for Leibowitz imagines religious belief of the future as a reflection of oddball events in the distant past—our own time, that is. And overall, there’s a kind of slow-hissing-of-air-out-of-a-balloon feel to the whole enterprise, as if this trilogy might have better been served up as a twin set.
Of interest to fans who have followed the story through the first two books, but a bumpy ride without that background.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-50500-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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