With powerful descriptions but low-watt plotting, a first novel details a sister’s acceptance of her sibling’s mental illness and her own struggle to survive. Fox, a poet, gets down pat the sensation of a walking-on-glass-life with the mentally ill, but the story itself —loosely autobiographical—told by Lorna, of life with older sister Lonnie, relies far too much on long set-piece scenes overburdened with imagery. And Lonnie, though vividly evoked, seems an elusive if immensely tragic figure, her illness never fully diagnosed. Lorna begins with their childhood in a Los Angeles suburb, where it is soon apparent that something is very wrong with Lonnie. Her emotions are volatile, she’s precociously intelligent, yet also dysfunctional, preoccupied with violence, fond of horror comics, decapitating toys, and creating multiheaded monsters with her stuffed animals. Later, Lonnie takes hormones to become the boy she feels she really is. She also dearly loves Oozy, the name she gives Lorna, who thinks Lonnie knows “stuff we can’t even imagine.” As she grows up, Lorna makes “an art out of normalcy,” trying to compensate for Lonnie’s craziness. She records her parents’ struggle to help her sister, the futile visits to doctors, hospitalizations, her mother’s growing emotional exhaustion, and the breakup of her parents’ marriage. At the same time, she is also maturing, making friends in high school, getting a boyfriend, discovering a talent for poetry and acting. But in college her normality begins to dissolve, and, haunted by Lonnie’s tragic plight, she breaks down. A long-evaded visit to Lonnie, now in a group home, helps her finally accept her family, herself, and her sister, whom she can now love and admire for her courage and her difference. Heartfelt, for sure, but told at a pace too stately to convey to readers the raw pain and tragic urgency of the situation.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84745-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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
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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