A rare stumble from an entertaining author who usually has a strong, sure hand with character.
Form trumps content in this slight holiday package from Landvik (The View from Mount Joy, 2007, etc.).
The story unfolds through a series of e-mails and notes, as a debauched heiress leaves her life of tabloid embarrassments for a state of sober normalcy. Though the tale has a certain lurid interest—think Paris and Britney, shaken and served—the method of conveyance doesn’t do the novel any favors; the prose is about as elegant as the average e-mail. Through exchanged missives, we learn of 26-year-old Caroline Dixon, rich, beautiful and usually drunk (a kind of holy trinity for the world’s paparazzi). Interspersed are updates on Caro’s exploits from the gossip column “Here’s Buzz,” which is cruel and, of course, quite popular. She winds up in rehab and afterward reaches out to those she’s hurt. Most of her flimsy friendships evaporate, but she gets encouraging responses from two ghosts from her past: Cyril, the owner of an Arizona dude ranch she visited at 13, and Astrid, her Norwegian nanny. Truth be told, they need Caro as much as she needs them. Widowed Cyril has lost all interest in people, and Astrid is holed up on a tiny Norwegian island, hoping that seclusion will protect her from any future pain. The trio have three-way communiqués, pour out their respective souls and decide that Christmas together at the dude ranch would all but guarantee a happier new year. Unfortunately, Cyril has a surprise guest who might push all good will out the window—the one and only “Buzz,” who has been shish-kabobbing Caro for years. Will everyone get along? Is romance in the air? Will the spirit of giving triumph? The story, a succession of page-long messages followed by longer e-mails jam-packed with none-too-subtle character exposition, sacrifices much for a gimmick that was worn out several years ago.
A rare stumble from an entertaining author who usually has a strong, sure hand with character.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-49975-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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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