Though full of groaners—“It was a drive down memory lane”—Meacham’s latest is of a piece with her past work, and sure to...
A topical soap opera from bestselling novelist Meacham (Roses, 2010, etc.), set on the familiar turf of small-town Texas.
Big hair is a big part of such places, but especially in the big-hair era of the early 1980s. Meacham captures the period details in her description of 11-year-old Cathy Benson, “her attitudes already formed by her upbringing and the ways and lifestyle of her native state”—that being California, the antipode of Kersey, Texas, with all the free-spiritedness and antinomianism that the Golden State might bring to the Lone Star State. Without really meaning to, Cathy gets inside the heads of two local boys, up-and-coming football stars for whom girls are a forbidden but irresistible attraction. What’s a quarterback to do? Well, one thing leads to another, and another, and another, and Cathy finds herself with a love bump and no place to go. Ah, but therein hangs much of the action of the book, which can be seen coming from a long way off; suffice it to say that the shotgun at book’s end isn’t necessarily meant to enforce a wedding. The plot is serviceable, the writing sometimes less so; one wonders what to do with a sentence such as, “The way he’d always thought of her had vanished as suddenly and completely as the boy’s make-believe playmate in the song ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon.’ ” Beg pardon? The soundtrack here ought to be provided by Boy George, if not Mickey Gilley. And there’s got to be a rule about expository sententiousness along the lines of “The town’s expectations were a heavy weight on their shoulders.” True enough, but no heavier than events are about to place on the lads, for all the unhappiness and convenient storyline twists that they entail.
Though full of groaners—“It was a drive down memory lane”—Meacham’s latest is of a piece with her past work, and sure to find an eager audience among romance buffs.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0924-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
IN THE NEWS
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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