Credible? Just barely. Fun? Immensely. As a chronicler of hip urban travails, Christensen (In the Drink, 1999) is first-rate.
A spirited take on the oft-told tale of a life falling apart, then patching itself together again: witty, humane, romantic, and just gossipy enough to keep you flipping pages.
Could life get much worse for Jeremy? He’s spent the last decade or so working on an unpublishable novel and serving as the inept caretaker of his boyfriend’s Manhattan brownstone. The boyfriend, though, is Ted Masterson, Hollywood’s hottest action hero, who’s not only absent most of the year but deeply in the closet and recently married. As the story opens, Ted, his super-starlet wife Giselle, and their adopted child have swept into town. But any chance of a hot if complicated reunion is quickly squelched when paranoid Ted presents Jeremy with his walking papers. Jeremy’s like the gay member of The First Wives Club, suddenly without a husband, a job, or a home. He even gets revenge, albeit bittersweet: a gossip columnist overhears him in a restaurant analyzing the breakup, which leads to a blind item that brings about Ted’s downfall. Fortunately, Jeremy’s got his family, biological or not. There’s sis, preoccupied with her band and her loutish husband, but with a spare room that Jeremy briefly occupies. Mom, a successful poet, busy with her third husband, who’s developing Alzheimer’s. Best friend Felicia, who picks now, of all times, to enter rehab and kick that nasty heroin habit. And even Dad, who headed off to Turkey 20 years ago but remains alive as the subject of Jeremy’s novel. Then sweaty-palmed, bug-eyed Sebastian—a former high-school mate and now the publisher of Boytoy—gives Jeremy his first job, writing porno. And slowly Jeremy starts to put his life together. He finds his own place. A production company wants to produce a nearly forgotten screenplay. He lands a better job as a copyeditor. An editor is interested in his novel. He calls his father. He gets a date.
Credible? Just barely. Fun? Immensely. As a chronicler of hip urban travails, Christensen (In the Drink, 1999) is first-rate.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0801-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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