Brown’s Fay (2000) remains his best—but it’s good to see him extending his range. The Rabbit Factory has much to recommend...
Relationships between people and animals and the hopes of both species that “love was out there for everybody, if they could just find it”: these are the central issues in this Alabama author’s relentlessly gritty latest.
In and nearby contemporary Memphis, several vividly sketched lovers and losers are quickly set into motion, and conflict. Septuagenarian Mr. Arthur explores ways to keep and sexually satisfy his smoldering younger wife Helen, who turns her attentions toward Eric, a young pet-store employee whose most meaningful relationship is with his (male) pit bull Jada Pinkett. Anjalee, a goodhearted whore marked by a history of family abuse, commits assault, goes on the lam, and attracts the stupefied devotion of Wayne Stubbock, a pugilistically gifted young sailor. Meanwhile, ex-con Domino D’Adamo, whose interstate drug business is compromised by his murderous gangster boss, experiences three unfortunate run-ins with cops, one of them an importunate black Amazon named Penelope—who takes up with Dom’s carjacking victim Merlot, a bachelor high-school teacher with a hidden secret love (named Candy). There’s considerable pleasure in Brown’s energetic deployment of these (really rather likable) grotesques, in a roiling, in-your-face melodrama whose comic-horrible details are variously reminiscent of Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, and the writer Brown most resembles: Erskine Caldwell. If the drumbeat momentum of his characters’ compulsively self-destructive behavior (symbolized by the title metaphor, a reference to the past Eric yearns to escape) seems forced, Brown nevertheless springs a few refreshing surprises. And the multiple staggered climaxes go a long way toward qualifying and contradicting what appears initially to be its rather generic naturalism.
Brown’s Fay (2000) remains his best—but it’s good to see him extending his range. The Rabbit Factory has much to recommend it.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4523-7
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
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
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