A vivid, fast-paced but schematic reprise of familiar themes from Alther (Bedrock, 1990, etc.), as latest protagonist Jude learns about love, life, and her sexuality in Tennessee, Manhattan, and Paris. When her beautiful mother dies in childbirth, Jude experiences the first of three traumatic losses that will shadow her life for many years. ``I want to be in heaven with my momma,'' she tells her father, the doctor in their Tennessee mountain town. But she also tells their housekeeper, ``I don't want to be a girl,'' because girls grow up, have babies, and die like her mother. Having laid out the themes of death and identity, Alther briskly moves on to tell the story of Jude's defining friendship with new neighbor Molly, a soulmate with whom she shares numerous activities. Junior high tests a friendship that had endured since first grade, as Molly, frightened of what her feelings for Jude imply, begins dating boys. When she's killed in an automobile accident, Jude's only consolation is local nerd Sandy's friendship. Sandy moves to New York and becomes an opera technician; Jude, now a graduate student, moves in with him and his friends. She soon learns that Sandy is gay, but there's a palpable attraction between them that they consummate only a few days before the Stonewall riots, in the wake of which Sandy is savagely beaten and dies. Poor Jude, now a successful editor, seems jinxed: Her next lover, an older married woman, also dies. But returning home after an unhappy time working in Paris, Jude finally understands that love, even when it ends with death, is ``the only thing about her that would survive.'' She is now ready to live and love again. Alther has the enviable knack of giving some heft to usually anodyne women's fiction, though her characters, often composites of current feminist angsts, are less successful. Still, fans will enjoy.
Pub Date: May 22, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93893-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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