An earnest fictional effort that, in all, still seems to be searching for what it really wants to be about.
Certain moments have their allure, but most things are familiar in Nevai’s (Normal, stories, 1997) tales of small-town gossip, suspicion, and intrigue.
Tamara Johanssen fled to the little Dustin, New York, because—well, because her very crazy mother burned down the family house along with the family members unlucky enough to be in it, the two exceptions being Tamara herself (out on a date, sort of) and older sister Nora, who’d already fled the coop and headed off to become a rich and big-time TV producer. This rather operatic premise, however, recedes quickly into the background as Tamara describes life in little Dustin, where she opens an art gallery—with money from sister Nora—and then segues into life as a photographer. The book is presented as a novel but reads more like a “novel-in-stories” hybrid—not that there’s anything wrong with that, except that in Nevai’s case a sense of novelistic growth seems to have gone missing. Part of the problem is the near-obligatory and afternoon-soap feel of much of the material: the mean-spirited old codger who runs the post office; the good-hearted woman who has the coffee shop; the crazed-by-property-rights person who sits on her lawn with a shotgun on Halloween—and actually shoots it at Tamara as she approaches. Add in an arsonist, a neurasthenic lesbian entrepreneur, downtrodden wives, stalkers, the wannabe Faulknerian episode of the eccentric who dies in his trailer but nobody knows it, so that—anyway, with all these lives from a latter-day Spoon River or Winesburg, Ohio, crowding the canvas, not only does Tamara’s secret (for awhile) affair with the lawyer-husband of sister Nora’s bitchy college roommate glide away as if on the river of the forgotten, but so does the theme of mother-madness that putatively first set the book’s events originally into motion.
An earnest fictional effort that, in all, still seems to be searching for what it really wants to be about.Pub Date: June 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-74693-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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