A bewildering array of detail offers little to satisfy stylistically.
Tucker’s far-fetched, heavily calibrated third novel, after Shout Down the Moon (2004), imagines the splintering effects of trauma on characters destined to meet between Hollywood, N.M. and St. Louis.
First, there is Stephen Spaulding, who lost his wife and young daughter in a car accident near their home in St. Louis. A family doctor at 30, Stephen gives up his practice after the accident to drive a cab and retell the story of the collision to whoever will listen. Next, there is the strangely anachronistic young woman Dorothea, who hires Stephen as a driver to help find her missing brother, Jimmy, hospitalized and homeless after fleeing the isolated New Mexico home of their reclusive father. Dressed, without irony, as if going to a ’50s sock hop, poor Dorothea has never even left her family home, let alone read a newspaper or watched TV. Finally, there is Lucy Dobbins, a singer living in Malibu, whose incredible story involves marriage 27 years before to famous Hollywood director Charles Keenan and his eventual disappearance and abduction of their two young children. The traumatic turning point of Lucy’s fairytale marriage to the much older, controlling Charles was a vicious attack by intruders at their posh mansion that left Lucy near death and her husband thereafter terrified of losing her and the children. All of these curious elements fit together in a creaking, painstakingly constructed plot: Dorothea and Jimmy emerge as the two long-lost children, removed by their paranoid father to isolation in New Mexico in order to shield them from bodily harm—in fact, leaving them with emotional scars too deep to heal. In the course of Stephen’s helping Dorothea care for her brother, a touching, unlikely romance sparks between the two needy trauma victims; discovery of the real identities of her parents is, predictably, imminent. Unfortunately, these toneless characters cannot contend with the busy plot.
A bewildering array of detail offers little to satisfy stylistically.Pub Date: April 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7434-9277-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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
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