Forensic fiction about women who question everything. In this debut collection of nine linked stories, Dick (Kicking, 1993, etc.) explores what contemporary women want—and what holds them back from achieving happiness. As if to insist on the communal and yet discordant nature of the theme, her method is to build a collage of voices embedded in various narrative forms that range from unadorned, script-like dialogue through informal lists and studious notes to slightly more conventional first- and third-person storytelling. What's the point? Dick is taking apart literary symmetries in order to let in the mess of female pain, subterfuge, and conflict so that these seem actual and formative, not merely imagined. Readers have to be willing to work at the fiction here in order to come away rewarded. The mostly static title story leads off the collection by providing largely documentary evidence of the careers of Charlotte Corday (who murdered insurrectionary leader Marat during the French Revolution and was guillotined at the age of 24, in 1793) and of the psychoanalyst manquÇ Princess Marie Bonaparte, who is almost as iconoclastic as Corday—and is the owner, 150 years after Corday's death, of her skull. These two women, who appear nowhere else in the book, loom like models of feminine subversion over the modern women who people the tales that follow. These others (Jeanie, Carrie, Louise, Bette, Jo, Gina, Catherine, Lee) converge mostly to air their well-thought-out complaints about love, sex, parenting, and other mortal concerns. Dick's virtue is to make us question human experience and motive without giving us noticeable guidance or answers for our questions. The drawback of her approach is that it lets the writer off the hook—she sacrifices some of her authority as author for the cause of an experimental realism. It's almost as though Dick has written one book that asks each of us to rewrite it in our own terms. Participatory fiction for the heady and restless.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83439-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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