Nine linked stories by East Village novelist Estep (Diary of an Emotional Idiot, 1997), who tries to milk fresh narrative out of the dried-up cow of Downtown counterculture. After a few pages, everyone here is as recognizable as bachelor uncles at a family reunion—and not just because Estep shuffles the same half-dozen characters into the deck from which she deals each story. In “Horses,” for example, a circus clown falls in love with Katie, the lion-tamer’s daughter, but loses her when she moves to New York to become a photographer. In “The Patient,” we meet Jody (who had once dated Katie’s father), a prodigiously oversexed psychiatrist who drives her boyfriend to near-suicide by making him impregnate an elderly lesbian. Joe, the narrator of “Circus,” meets Katie, and the two carry on until Joe pulls a reverse Katie and abandons her for a circus job. Meanwhile, in “Teeth,” Jody seduces one of her patients by masturbating during his session but dumps him when he refuses to sleep with a whore she brings home. Kate’s sister Alfie is a lesbian bike messenger who sometimes sleeps with Indio, a guy from work (“The Messenger”). Jack, the patient Jody dumped in “Teeth,” starts screwing around with Katie in “Animals.” Jack is a petty criminal who’s into Caravaggio and gets jealous when Katie decides to go on a yachting expedition with an ex-boyfriend (“Monkeys”). Last, in “One of Us,” Jody herself is institutionalized, having married Toby (another of her patients) and been driven crazy trying to adopt the baby that her elderly lesbian friend gave birth to shortly before her death. Which is all very sad. Probably. Pomo angst that seems far more transparent than transgressive, written in the kind of faux-blasÇ prose (“I had a rambling apartment in Brooklyn and I fucked my girlfriend Jody in every part of it”) that would make Henry Miller think it was written by kids.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86333-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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