The author of The Fatigue Artist (1995), among several others, rings mischievous changes on the idea of “family values.” Schwartz made her fictional debut with Rough Strife (1980), a fairly dark view of marriage and kinship bonds. Here, she takes a much lighter tone as she romps through the intricate interconnections of a very extended family, most of its members living in apartments in an Upper West Side building owned by elderly but still randy widow Anna, and managed by her 50ish daughter Bea. The story opens with Bea’s ex-husband Roy succumbing to a pass from his second wife, Serena, who now lives with Bea’s sister May. Serena and May want a baby, and Roy—a psychotherapist and generally agreeable guy—is willing to oblige. He’s shortly to marry Lisa, his daughter Shimmer’s math teacher, so he’s in a generous mood. By the end, Serena, Lisa, and Roy’s daughter-in-law, Melissa, are all giving birth at the same hospital in a rather silly scene that provides a limp climax to a generally enjoyable book. Schwartz provides just enough dark undertones to keep the merriment from feeling trivial: Anna is slowly losing her memory; Tony, Roy’s son with a Vietnamese prostitute, feels cut off from his roots and alienated from his yuppy wife; Danny, Roy and Bea’s son, keeps falling in love with unsuitable, unavailable women; Bea, a caterer by profession and a compulsive nurturer by instinct, can—t seem to prevent her life from being swallowed up in other people’s needs; and most of the characters sense an existential loneliness underlying their frantic (and quite touching) efforts to connect with others. Plausibility is not a top priority here. By the time the wayward daughter of one of Roy’s patients turns out to be Shimmer’s best friend, readers may find all the coincidences and apartment-sharing a bit ridiculous. Still, Schwartz’s old-fashioned storytelling and vivid—if not necessarily deep—characterizations carry the day.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-17071-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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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