Excruciating.
Trueblood (The Sperm Donor’s Daughter & Other Tales of Modern Family, 1998) considers the personal politics of choice in her first novel.
Nan is an obstetric nurse. She’s also the mother of a teenaged daughter and a young son, and she has a husband who’s semi-available emotionally—he sleeps in the shed when the pressures of marriage are just too much. Jean used to be a social worker. Now she’s managing a condominium complex and seething about the fact that her ex—with whom she tried for many years to have a child—has just become a father by his second wife. Virginia teaches college students to write, but she’s finding the job detrimental to the progress of her own novel as she cares for her young son and tends to her dissolving marriage. Tasi is a businesswoman who’s only just discovering that she’s not quite as satisfied with the commitment-free relationships she’s always cultivated. All of these women are approaching middle age, live in or around Seattle and have been friends since college. The book is constructed around one episode in the life of a fifth friend: Charlotte. Pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want, Charlotte decides to have a late-term abortion. While this synopsis is true enough in its details, it suggests a level of organization and narrative energy that the book lacks. As the central fact of the novel, Charlotte’s abortion should be a catalyzing event, one that provokes and challenges the other characters. Instead, each woman’s initial reaction to the abortion remains her only reaction. They all talk about it—isn’t that what girlfriends do?—but they just say the same things over and over again. Trueblood seems to have a perverse determination to avoid action whenever she can, preferring instead to render ostensibly important events in mental op-ed pieces and offhand recollections. The reader doesn’t even know for sure that the abortion has actually taken place until Jean and Nan are discussing it after the fact.
Excruciating.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-57962-151-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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