Stark delineation of childhood’s treacherous terrain.
A family reels when an angelic son vanishes, in Carey’s heartfelt fourth novel.
In less capable hands, the story of a family torn apart by a runaway teenager, especially one who returns as a guardian angel, could turn mawkish. Hugh Furey is 15 when he goes missing after attempting to visit his ex-girlfriend in rehab. Hugh had been making the ’80s punk scene in Harvard Square instead of attending high school. His father, a professor of theology at Boston College, suspends work on a groundbreaking angels treatise to oversee the search for Hugh. His wife takes to her bed and turns over housekeeping and childcare for five-year-old Owen to their young daughter Lena. Five years later, Hugh is still missing. Dad has lost his post and is now an editor for a religious publisher. Mom is in med school. A mutual attraction binds Owen, now ten, to classmate Danny, who initiates sexual exploration, happened upon by Danny’s mother. Now a pariah at school due to Danny’s defensive queer-baiting, Owen malingers, missing weeks of fifth grade. Secluded in his room, he indulges his obsession with gravestone rubbings and angels—he recalls being rescued from electrocution by an angelicized Hugh. Tenth-grader Lena, talented, like Hugh, in photography, develops rolls of 35mm film shot by Hugh depicting his Harvard Square friends. She’s determined to follow the trail her parents have seemingly abandoned. Disguising herself as a spiky-haired, combat-booted boy, she goes in search of drug-dealer Lionel, a regular in Hugh’s photos. Enticed into the Ecstasy-popping and pot-smoking world of Sebastian, a conduit to Lionel, she reckons the cost, to Owen and herself, of her parents’ shell-shocked obliviousness. After transgressing the gender divide, virtually channeling Hugh and losing her virginity, Lena thinks she has found the key to Hugh’s disappearance. Alternating between Owen’s and Lena’s points of view, Carey (Love in the Asylum, 2004, etc.) details the Fureys’ disintegration and tentative steps toward rapprochement.
Stark delineation of childhood’s treacherous terrain.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-621289-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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