Some marvelously rendered sketches of domestic torment and grief are lost in a rambling and largely unfocussed narrative—and...
Disappointingly tame fare from the talented Bledsoe (Cougar Canyon, 2002, etc.).
Christine never seems to have gotten over the unexplained loss, 30 years ago, of her baby brother Timothy, who vanished without a trace as a five-year-old. The fact that Christine (then age ten) and her sister Liz were responsible for keeping an eye on Timothy as he swam in a campground lake gave an added guilt to the tragedy, which seemed to disfigure Christine both emotionally and psychologically. A lesbian malcontent, Christine practices medicine in a rough neighborhood of San Francisco and appears to be as dissatisfied with her career as she is with her perpetually unsettled love life. In apparent contrast, her sister Liz is happily married to her high-school sweetheart Mark, the two living in utopian domesticity on a small farm not far from the Bay Area. But Liz has her quirks, too: her penchant for taking troubled children into her home bespeaks a similar, more deeply buried, guilt. When Liz and Mark invite Christine on a camping trip (along with Lenny, their latest juvenile delinquent, and Mark’s secretary Melody), however, the stresses eventually crack. Unspoken resentments flare up between the sisters, only to be fanned into open flames when Christine discovers that Melody is having an affair with Mark (whom Christine herself secretly bedded many years ago). If this sounds like typical family angst, it isn’t—not with the ghost of a vanished child hovering over everyone. Can there be any relief from the anxieties of Timothy’s loss? Only if the truth can be found.
Some marvelously rendered sketches of domestic torment and grief are lost in a rambling and largely unfocussed narrative—and the denouement comes so much out of nowhere that it falls flat.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55583-773-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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