There aren’t many surprises in the collection, but there are no disappointments, either. Essential for students of...
The esteemed literary award volume returns for another installment, full, as ever, of exemplary short fiction.
Money can make a fellow murderous, especially when that fellow has come from out of nowhere—say, Jay Gatsby—and sort of fell into what he found to be a pretty nice way to pass the time, being rich and all. Or maybe it was something else: “I told you, that guy might have been successful but he wasn't quite right up there, he’d been in Tiananmen, maybe it messed up his head.” So writes Tash Aw, a Malaysian novelist long resident in London, in his illuminating story “Sail,” psychologically dense and strange enough to be memorable, not to mention beautifully written. Published in A Public Space, Aw’s story comes from among the least-known authors and venues in this collection. Others are the usual suspects, published in places such as the New Yorker, Tin House and the Kenyon Review: Andrea Barrett, Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, Donald Antrim. Elite status is no hindrance; this isn’t the Pushcart Prize, with at least half an eye out for nurturing newcomers, but instead, as good a picture of the state of the art of short story writing as there is. Munro’s story, for instance, published not long before she announced that she was retiring from writing, is an evocation of a past when “there was a movie theatre in every town” and people didn’t think to lock their doors at night; it being Munro, though, that past harbors its own secrets, some of them quite disturbing. Other stories are meta-referential without being archly so; Beattie, for example, does a nice bit of intergenerational banter on the large topic of anecdote, while Ruth Prawer Jhabvala slyly opens her contribution with, “Kishen’s university friends at Cambridge completely understood when he talked to them about the sort of novel that should be written about India—the sort of novel that he wanted to write.”
There aren’t many surprises in the collection, but there are no disappointments, either. Essential for students of contemporary fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-80325-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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