New York attorney Heller’s second novel (The Love Wars, 2013) is a triumph of witty dialogue and characters as true to life...
The prodigal daughter returns after 20 years, but the happy Reinhardts aren’t sure what to do with her gloomy presence in this sly fiction about families.
Paige is a bit ambivalent about the big news—Sloane is coming to Manhattan for a visit. She hasn’t had contact with her older sister in two decades, since Sloane ran away from a ritzy rehab at 16. Mother Vanessa is guardedly optimistic that they may be a family again, while father Frank is treating the event as he does most: in a state of genial oblivion. Paige’s husband, Dave, has weightier concerns—his law firm has suspended him for a few weeks, and they (or he) won’t say why. For a striving workaholic, this is a death sentence, but Paige’s response is heavy on suspicion and light on sympathy. (How embarrassing for her, considering that she’s a therapist.) When sullen Sloane arrives, she has little interest in reconnecting with her parents, but Paige she likes. And Paige is shocked to meet Sloane’s traveling companion, fiance Giovanni, who is charming and bright, and their little dog, Bandito, who accompanies them as they visit chic eateries for Sloane’s travel blog. The myth of Sloane encompassed so much catastrophe that Paige is a bit surprised to befriend a fairly normal, if occasionally moody, real person. Begging out of their summer outings, Dave becomes increasingly distant, and Paige is convinced he’s involved with some illegal shenanigans. Paige hires Giovanni’s best friend, Percy (she calls him the Adonis), to use his skills as private investigator to ferret out the truth—though she won’t be happy when she gets it. Thankfully, she now has her big sister’s shoulder to cry on.
New York attorney Heller’s second novel (The Love Wars, 2013) is a triumph of witty dialogue and characters as true to life as your best friends.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-451-41624-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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