A bittersweet comedy with a fine sharp edge.
The contrasting virtues of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Eudora Welty’s elegiac family reunion novel Losing Battles are neatly conjoined in this entertaining 11th from the popular North Carolina author (The Christmas Letters, 1996, etc.).
A reunion brings together several former college roommates and friends, 35 years after the great adventure of their youth: a 1965 trip by raft down the Mississippi River (“Just like Huck and Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”), from Paducah, Kentucky, to New Orleans. Center stage are five of the girls: never-married schoolteacher (and former would-be writer) Harriet Holding, unhappily married Courtney Ralston, thrice-married beauty Catherine Hurt, successful romance novelist Anna “Todd,” and the group’s wealthy, impulsive golden girl, Margaret “Baby” Ballou—recently deceased, and seen only in the extended flashbacks that Smith skillfully interweaves with the present action. We eventually learn a great deal about each of these five, and the potential for sudsy cliché (Catherine’s discovery of a lump in her breast, “perfect” Courtney’s disastrous plunge into adultery) is deflected by vivid dialogue and what might be called rhetorical special effects, including several of Baby’s narcissistic yet pointedly self-critical poems (one contains the lines “but I’m such a bitch/deep inside/where I hide”) and hilarious parodies of the paperback-Gothic sensibility that suffuses both Anna’s fiction and her imagined romance with a handsome young steward on The Belle of Natchez (the steamboat on which “the last girls” are reliving their youth). Best of all is Smith’s sympathetic characterization of the central figure of Harriet: an intelligent, reserved woman who quietly accepts responsibility for having helped destroy her own happiness, and perhaps also the privileged, ill-fated Baby Ballou’s precipitous decline.
A bittersweet comedy with a fine sharp edge.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-363-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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