Moments of real vision, pathos and poetry, but never entirely convincing.
Cleverly conceived but sketchy first novel revisits John, Paul, George, and Ringo in an alternate 1987.
In this world, the Beatles broke up in 1962, when John Lennon walked out of Abbey Road Studios over management's decision to release treacle instead of honest rock-and-roll. George Harrison and Ringo Starr followed him back to Liverpool, but Paul McCartney followed his crowd-pleasing, bottom-line instinct (and Brian Epstein) to America. Without the Beatles, rock withered and the ’60s never became The Sixties. When we catch up with them, George is a Jesuit priest, teetering in and out of madness, John is an embittered crank on the dole tortured by visions of what might have been, and henpecked husband Ringo is his amusing, level-headed friend, rescuing Lennon from scrapes as they cadge drinks at the pubs, occasionally sitting in on gigs with other Mersey Beat has-beens like Gerry and the Pacemakers. McCartney, now Paul Montana, is a Vegas crooner, thrice-divorced (Nancy Sinatra was first), an embarrassing cross between Wayne Newton and Sammy Davis Jr. In crisis over the cancellation of his TV series, Paul decides to reunite the Beatles and recapture the flame of youth during his upcoming trip to perform for Queen Di. The novel plays out over one day in a Britain on the brink of being taken over by the far-right National Front; Julian Lennon is one of its rising stars. The now middle-aged boys drink and fight, perform and bond, struggle with the past, and finally accept their lots. Kirwan, leader of the Celtic band Black 47, first spun his fantasy as a play, and it shows. The characters are amalgams of identifying tics that would work better as stage business, and the larger political story playing out in the background feels like caulking slapped onto the joints between acts.
Moments of real vision, pathos and poetry, but never entirely convincing.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-497-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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