A contemporary girl-meets-boy story that taps into an age-old lament by women: Men. Can’t live with ’em. Can’t live without...
Mathieu’s (The Next to Last Drink, 2014, etc.) novel explores the evolutionary concepts of masculinity and femininity, the societal norms that shape us, and some good, old-fashioned romance.
Nora Bookbinder is a flinty go-getter of a gallery owner in Maine. She lives a happily single existence, helping her ailing father, Eugene; walking on the beach and discussing life with her best friend, Emma; and feeling that most men have a violent streak and that she’s better off without them. But when an earthquake hits (in an apt metaphor for the havoc it wreaks on the protagonist’s life), seismologist Drew Hollister comes to town. He’s smart, capable, and interesting, which would be enough to turn any woman’s head. When he turns Nora’s, in spite of her well-crafted defenses, he not only taps into her passion but pierces her very sense of self. It’s a cataclysmic shock that leads to her skipping town for a vacation. As readers watch Nora grapple with what love means and what it does, Mathieu’s prose is often ponderous (“Drew was always on my mind, continually, like a compressor running in the background”), and scenes often shift from past to present with stop-and-start jerks. Also, Nora’s independence-at-any-cost persona and distrust of all male-female relationships can make her feel less than three-dimensional; it’s hard not to want her character to evolve, even as one roots for her to hang onto her feminist ideals. “I had become like ordinary women I had long criticized for succumbing to desire,” Nora tells readers. “Loving Drew had made me vulnerable.” Of course, that’s exactly what love does—and how it often brings about the best in people. That said, women who’ve dealt with similar conflicts in their own lives will want to cheer Nora on.
A contemporary girl-meets-boy story that taps into an age-old lament by women: Men. Can’t live with ’em. Can’t live without ’em.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5369-1081-0
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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