The best of modern Czech fiction, comic though it may be, is done in the grays of sarcasm, irony, philosophy; it can make you forget the great baroque tradition of Czech art, the overmuchness and the gilt and the gaiety. First-novelist Mon°kov†, now living in Berlin, makes you remember, though—in this spectacularly classic comedy that manages at once to be: a slapstick epic; one of the very few novels that credibly portray artists; and an astounding sweep in the highest spirits through Czech and Russian history. The ``M.N.O.P.Q.'' of the subtitle are three Czech art- academicians—Maltzahn, Orten, Podol—at work on restoring murals on the facade of a historic Bohemian castle; and two young resident scholars at the castle—Nordanc and Qvietone. The five, deciding on a group vacation to Japan, where Orten is invited to work on a mural, set out on a journey that lands them (thanks to impossible Russian travel arrangements and language-difficulties) in Siberia instead. With only their national hatred for the depredations of '68 to orient them, the group finds itself stuck in a Siberian think tank—Akademogorodok—that they've been brought to by accident; it'll finally take an amateur theatrical of Gogol's The Inspector General, and then a Czech-Russian hockey game, to win their release (this whole section being a brilliant revision of Kafka). Science, folklore, history, they rush over the book like successive waterfalls—punctuated by hilarious chases, brawls, and vaudevillian adventures. A book that makes most ``magic realism'' or ``pendanto- fiction'' (Eco, Pavic) read like five-finger exercises. You have to go back to Bellow's Henderson the Rain King to find a novel so exuberantly imaginative, high and low, bursting with such steam and intelligence.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-57250-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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