Rings true without being clichéd, a neat trick.
Debut novelist Ehrhorn works impressive CPR on a trope that has been done to death: the Sturm und Drang of surviving high school.
In 1960s-era Chicago, Talbot High School senior Kelly Elliott is living not the dream, but the nightmare. His acne is all but terminal; he has never had a date; he has just wised off to Joe Swedarsky, the class bully—and that’s just the start of his torments. His single mother, left by his feckless father years ago, has a sometime lover who is a cheater and dangerously abusive. His high school teachers are the typical mixed and sometimes-sadistic bag. There are the usual high school embarrassments, as when Kelly lets loose the fart heard ’round the gym right in front of Laura LeDuc, head cheerleader who seems so sweet but—he finally learns—is a player, a manipulator. He does find love, after a fashion, with Linda Martinsen, who is worthy of it. His real connection, however, is with Mary Harker (aka Ginny Dare), a stripper who understands him, anchors him, comforts him. These lessons are painful but necessary. Senior year does come to a merciful end, finding a newly reflective Kelly, a Kelly who has found a real measure of understanding and acceptance of hard truths. Ehrhorn writes well. One finds sentences like, “The series of life’s dominoes were continuing their cascade” to describe Kelly’s hapless, up-and-down life. The chapters are almost self-contained episodes, each contributing to Kelly’s education. An interesting point is that it is the women—Kelly’s mom, Linda Martinsen, and especially Mary Harker—who are his most valuable teachers, while the males—Swedarsky, Kelly’s long-gone father, the abusive Dan Phillips, and others—are the anti role models. The most poignant passages are those between Kelly and Mary Harker. The stripper with a heart of gold is a tired and strained cliché, but Ehrhorn pulls it off beautifully and tenderly. What finally happens to Mary is a godawful kick in the gut but absolutely faithful to the story.
Rings true without being clichéd, a neat trick.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-92846-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Madijean Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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