Riveting material is given redundant and indifferent treatment in this misshapen first novel ``about horror and the macabre in India,'' by Siegel (Net of Magic, not reviewed, etc.), a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii. Its author-researcher's stay in the city of Varanasi steeps him in images—and evidence—of both fabulistic and factual horrors, beginning with the woman who transforms herself into the ``human bomb'' that assassinates Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, then focusing major attention on a locally famous itinerant storyteller, Brahm Kathuwala, a ghostly figure whom Siegel pursues throughout most of this book's duration. An extended story that Brahm tells listeners who gather about him nightly is juxtaposed, more or less, with Siegel's piecemeal recapitulation of the life of the tale- teller, a lonely and effectively motherless boy whose obsessive fascination with his near-namesake Bram Stoker is reflected in eerie coincidences between Stoker's lurid masterpiece and Brahm's own experiences and relationships. ``I wrote it in a former life,'' the latter Brahm says of Dracula, acknowledging that he may indeed be a reincarnation, if not something even more evanescent (``Sometimes I have to wonder . . . whether I'm a storyteller or a story told,'' he proclaims elsewhere). It's hard to know what this curiously organized fiction aims to say, beyond the obvious implication that horror takes many forms in the roiling chaos of political and religious instability that is India. The reader is kept at a confused distance by the ``novel's'' apparently arbitrary structure, profusion of epigraphs, surfeit of sickeningly visceral detail, and undifferentiated reappearances of lepers, poisonous snakes, flesh-eating corpses, and other stock paraphernalia that have the obviously unintended effect of diverting our attention from the putative central story—of Brahm Kathuwala, whoever, or whatever, he may be. In Dracula, Bram Stoker had the good sense to contain his otherworldly contrivances within a compelling linear narrative. One wishes the author of this unfortunately turgid homage to it had done the same.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-226-75688-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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