Honest and entertaining.
A successful PR associate must come to terms with resurrected high school demons.
On the surface, Olivia Morten’s life seems perfect: she has a rewarding career in which she finely orchestrates celebrities’ public images; an attractive, successful neurosurgeon husband; a dream house; and of course, a flawless body. It’s evident from the beginning of Palmer's (Girl Before a Mirror, 2015, etc.) latest, though, that a shameful secret lurks under this veneer: the memory of what she terms Fat Me, the “forever alone, overly emotional, out-of-control” embodiment of her high school self. Olivia has hidden her past so well that even her husband knows only bits and pieces of the truth, and in the image-obsessed Hollywood bubble in which Olivia works, it’s vital that she never let herself slip. But a chance encounter with her high school crush (and tormentor), Ben Dunn, at a coffee shop inconveniently brings Fat Me to the forefront of her consciousness. And when the perfect volunteer opportunity for salvaging a celebrity client’s reputation arises—at a Halloween Fair for foster children in the high school at which Ben is now principal—Olivia’s forced deeper yet into her own personal time machine. As the Halloween plans progress (as does the sexual tension with Ben) and her marriage and personal life begin to fracture around her, Olivia is finally compelled to take a hard look at Fat Me and the person she’s become in order to hide her. This leads to an arc of self-realization that’s satisfying but somewhat oversimplified, implying that one can lay years of restrictive eating patterns by the wayside in one sudden burst of self-acceptance. Nonetheless, Palmer develops her characters well—Olivia is complicated, flawed, and reflective, transforming what could have been a flat, superficial novel into one that’s by turns funny, painfully honest, and hard to put down (though descending periodically into clichéd territory). Palmer uses a light touch to broach the subject of female body image, both in Olivia’s mind and as a constant societal background hum—from the crusty baguette eaten only by the men at a dinner party to the way Olivia’s celebrity client must be seated with her back to the restaurant, “to lower the risk of a photo of her putting food in her mouth.” It’s vindicating, then, to watch Olivia rise above the noise, even when it’s as simple as asking for the bread to be passed to her at a dinner party.
Honest and entertaining.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08347-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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