Dick's second novel (after Without Falling, 1988—not reviewed) begins with a clever nouvelle roman flourish but soon finds its own level as a pretentious, stilted melodrama set in the so-called art worlds of London and New York in the Eighties. Told from the perspective of a neurasthenic young art critic named Connie, this self-consciously cinematic narrative concerns an on-again, off-again love triangle that can't sustain the weight of such belabored analysis. The opening scene, in which Connie witnesses a suicide, provides an interesting exercise in context and perspective but finally has little to do with the main story. Jumping back and forth through time, Connie meditates on her friendship with artists Michael and Ruby, her friends since they were all so young, and pretty and brilliant, according to Connie. What they say and do and create, however, suggests a trio of sexually promiscuous, politically shallow, and artistically lame characters more concerned with acting like artists than producing anything of real value. Brooding Michael is given to excess (he takes lots of heroin) and says things like ``God, it's all so fucking bourgeois.'' Ruby, a fellow Brit, also walks on the wild side and espouses revolutionary chic ideology. Connie, herself ``succumbed to ennui,'' romances death but doesn't take as many drugs—she reads Sylvia Plath instead. Half-American, she too has everything paid for by Mummy and Daddy. Her experience of art is hardly hypercritical (``She was knocked out by the Warhol''), and her reflections on her relationships are surprisingly girlish. An extended episode about a $500 debt suggests that Connie might be even crazier than she or her creator realizes. Imagine Tama Janowitz's ``art scene'' without even an attempt at humor, and you begin to get the silly solemnity of this self- mythologizing novel whose main characters are an annoying, whiny bunch of poseurs.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-87286-282-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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
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