A debut novel by a California librarian takes off from the spritely theme of postmortal switched identity, played under the comic mantle of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.. Katharine Ashley, wife and mother of two teenagers, dies and awakens but a year later to find herself housed in the dead body of Thisby Flute Bennet, a Los Angeles druggie 15 years her junior. With her face laid flat against an unfamiliar bathroom floor, she surges into the addict’s wracked, wraith-like body. Days pass; the fires of addiction flame and lower. She fitfully cleans her filthy apartment and gathers the dregs of Thisby’s life together. Meanwhile, a phone call to her former home reveals that her husband has remarried and her old family gained a fresh semblance of emotional balance, although her son blames himself for the stress that killed her And so, very gradually, Katharine/Thisby comes to terms with her novel incarnation as a recovering addict (and a budding photographer), as well as with her well-to-do second family, including younger sister Quince and brother Puck. Before they married, her new parents had once performed together in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the play’s spirit hangs densely over each family member—even over their dogs, Snout and Oberon. But living as Thisby is really not easy. Her new family distrusts her; she’s attracted to her handsome new father; her brother lusts for her, and at length springs into action. When Thisby’s bad-news old boyfriend turns up, she gets pregnant—but is it by her brother or her boyfriend? Then her own erstwhile teenage children show up with their problems—plus she’s become an alcoholic. As Katharine painfully learns, not even indisputable proof of an afterlife can lift her out of the mire of human problems. A well-told and soulful effort.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-19675-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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