Do not try this at home.
A young New Yorker goes to India to seek enlightenment.
“In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna’s sorrow shows him the path to unite with the universal consciousness.…Your discontent with the world as it is will lead you to your union.” Bajaj’s debut novel updates the classic formula of the yogic quest, from the first glimmer of dissatisfaction with worldly things all the way to universal consciousness in a frozen cave. Here, the disillusioned householder is a young Wall Street analyst named Max, the son of a Greek immigrant mother who managed get him out of the projects and off to Harvard. But when she dies of cancer, the meaninglessness of his existence overwhelms him. Inspired by a lunchtime conversation with an Indian falafel vendor, he goes back to the office, “switches over from Excel to Chrome and [begins] searching the Internet for information about Himalayan yogis.” Within days, he’s on a plane to Delhi. All the steps and missteps of Max’s path, including ashrams, gurus, false leads, long hikes under terrible conditions, and a panoply of extreme spiritual practices and privations are dramatized in exhaustive detail. “Max walked to the edge of the lake and concentrated on the caves on the opposite side. Closing his eyes, he inhaled and exhaled one hundred and eighty times….He retained his breath ten, twelve, fifteen, seventeen minutes….Next he exhaled quickly….Max performed samyama on his navel and visualized every root nerve of his body alive with the same stream of minute energy particles that the water in front of him was. He took a step forward. Energy merged with energy. There was nothing under his feet.”
Do not try this at home.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-411-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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