An overwritten first novel with a high emotional pitch tells of two very different women whose lives briefly intersect, and are changed forever, when one, mourning her own losses, steals the other’s baby. Lynelle, despite her happy marriage to Hogan, is still hurting from the death of her mother, Grace, when she was a child in Florida. Now living in New Jersey, she names her newborn Grace, but the child dies from sudden infant death syndrome. Unable to deal with this new grief on top of her old sorrows, Lynelle goes to Florida for healing comfort. Meanwhile, in Illinois, Annie, wife of successful executive David and mother of Nick, Sophie, and baby Dylan, works as a volunteer at a battered women’s center while studying for her master’s. Yet she feels frazzled and tired, and though she loves Dylan dearly, she hadn—t wanted a third child’she—d wanted instead to make a life for herself. She hopes her upcoming visit to Florida to see her ailing father will restore her. Told in alternating chapters, the two women’s tales are filled with would-be profundities: “[H]e understood me in a funny roundabout kind of way. The only way anyone can understand another person, by looking sideways, around the face we put on for the world.” In Florida, Lynelle impulsively makes off with Dylan, whom Nick has momentarily left alone, and heads to her old home, only to find all the familiar landmarks gone. When Dylan is discovered missing, Annie is distraught, Nick feels guilty, and David, usually in control, can’t handle the crisis. The baby is soon found, and Lynelle is arrested, but Annie, relieved that Dylan is safe, wants to meet his kidnapper. A meeting ensues, with unexpected consequences for both of them. Now they can move on, having learned that being loved and forgiven matters, that life is filled with “love and pain, with loss and discovery.” Pulp fiction.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-525-94536-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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