Touching on the travails of birth and death among elephants (and humans), Echlin offers a tender, mesmerizing account of the last stages in a mother and daughter’s relationship. Called back from Zimbabwe, where she—d been studying cave paintings, Sophie returns to her native Ontario to aid her mother, terminally ill with cancer. The family home, bordering on a small safari-zoo, provides Sophie with fine views of elephants making their daily march from the barn into the snowy fields beyond—and not a bad view, either, of their male keeper, Jo Mann. She and Jo fall rather quickly into bed and then into an easy relationship. As part of the tale, Echlin surrenders an inventive “Elephant-English dictionary,” a tome Sophie is creating based on her infrasound audio recordings and bits of which, highly idiosyncratic and anecdotal, are interspersed throughout the story (a particular elephantine expression of longing, for example, reminds Sophie of the last lines of an Ezra Pound poem). Sadly enough, her growing fascination with the elephants, and her pregnancy by Jo, coincide with her mother’s decline; once a vital person, as well as an artist, the dying woman now simply withdraws into the seclusion of her room. Amid their sometimes disquieting, sometimes soothing routine, Sophie listens to her mother reminisce about her long-ago life in Paris. Then the dark presence of Alecto intervenes: an elephant researcher, he won his reputation by shooting elephants in the wild for the autopsy opportunities to be gained. The climax—a heady convergence of Sophie’s mother’s death, an attempted rape, and an elephant charging—ends up leaving Sophie alone at last with the elephants and her new daughter, settled and purposeful. A sometimes emotionally scattered debut, but the intriguing lore of the big-tusked, long-trunked quadrupeds transforms it into a lovely treatise on the noble compassion of animals.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0610-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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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