Consistently lukewarm plot and painfully tidy conclusion, but Junior’s character is strongly written, and Wells’s sense of...
A mildly interesting concoction from the author of Meely LaBauve (2000), this one featuring a down-and-out roustabout, a Mafia murder, and true love in the heart of a hard man, all of it fed through spicy regional dialect and local coloration.
As we meet Joseph “Junior” Guidry, he lies flat-out broke, drunk, and in despair after losing his leg in a Gulf of Mexico oil rig accident. He successfully sued the oil company with the help of his lawyer, Syd Shainburg, and won a $150,000 settlement, but Junior blew it on drinks, women, and cars. Now he’s waiting for something to come along that will change his situation. Through the bayou to Junior’s trailer in the Great Catahoula Swamp comes Iris Mary Parfait, who imposes herself into his life—cooking, cleaning, and slowly healing him—but promises to stay out of his “business.” The agreement doesn’t hold, and soon Iris reveals she is on the run from a bar owner with Mob connections. While tending to Rocko Marchante’s ailing mother, Iris saw the sexual terrors he inflicted on his women and was nearly subjected to them herself before she managed to injure Rocko and escape his horrific household. Just as Junior is starting to feel her pain and sharing some of his hurt with her, a “podnuh” shows up with news that Rocko has put a $100,000 bounty on Iris’s head. She’s captured, but Junior rescues her in a violent encounter that leaves Rocko and his men desperately wounded. Lawyer Shainburg shows up again, pulls some strings, does some research, and eventually brings down Rocko and the local Sheriff Ervil Geaux, leaving Junior and Iris free to marry and come to terms with their traumatic lives.
Consistently lukewarm plot and painfully tidy conclusion, but Junior’s character is strongly written, and Wells’s sense of place confers a pleasing authority to his Cajun-style prose.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50526-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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