Avoids the obvious clichés, while harkening pleasantly back to ’50s-era motherhood humor classics like Jean Kerr’s Please...
In Center’s lighthearted latest (The Bright Side of Disaster, 2007), a young mother yearns for self-realization while wrangling three boisterous preschoolers and a distracted husband.
Lanie Coates’ introduction to Cambridge, Mass., where her composer husband Peter has begun graduate studies, is a local park, where she hopes to find other mothers to befriend. The Coateses, including three boys, Alexander, Toby and Baby Sam, all under the age of five, moved from Lanie’s close-knit Houston neighborhood, leaving her supportive parents behind. At the park, the mothers recoil in shock when Toby bites another child. All, that is, but one woman, who asks Lanie when she’s due. But Lanie isn’t pregnant—she hopes. Just as she’s about to demure, Amanda, Lanie’s cheerleader high-school classmate, appears out of nowhere and offers to organize a shower. Determined to drop postpartum pounds, Lanie signs up with a local gym. Every weeknight, after the kids are in bed, Lanie works out on the treadmill, ignoring glances from a middle-aged fellow exerciser with Ted Koppel hair. Peter, busy with his piano, mostly leaves Lanie to single-handedly supervise the boys. Hoping to revive her artistic career, former painter Lanie takes up photography and finds that she’s a natural despite having to fend off her instructor, the very same Ted Koppel look-alike. When Peter, on the eve of a career-making trip, catches “Ted” kissing Lanie, a communication impasse ensues, not helped by Lanie’s tendency to mislay cell phones. Amanda, mother of preternaturally docile Gracin, tries to mentor Lanie’s makeover, but tempers her beauty and sex tips with disillusion. (Amanda’s wealthy but homely husband has decamped, bursting her Martha Stewart bubble.) In less deft hands, the horrors of the out-of-control Coates toddlers would resemble bad reality television, but Center’s breezy style invites the reader to commiserate, laughing all the way, with Lanie’s plight.
Avoids the obvious clichés, while harkening pleasantly back to ’50s-era motherhood humor classics like Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6643-8
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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