Newcomer Yoshikawa tries but fails to weave the story of a young woman’s doomed love affair in Manhattan seamlessly together with the tale of her Japanese grandmother who was once a geisha. Kiki, the narrator, is a graduate student in English at Columbia and, as the story begins, thinks she may be in love with Eric, a handsome young Jewish lawyer she met at a concert. But she is also literally haunted by Phillip, the love of her life, who was killed while climbing in the Himalayas. Kiki keeps seeing Phillip in her apartment—on the window sill, in the kitchen, on a shelf—which doesn’t help her affair with Eric, though she soon accepts his proposal of marriage. As Kiki recalls how she met Phillip, a young man born to wander and charm, and as she worries that Eric may have a fetish about Asian women, she writes imaginary letters to her grandmother Yukiko, who, now a widow, has promised to visit Kiki and her mother, Akiko, in the fall. Kiki identifies strongly with her grandmother and looks forward to hearing Yukiko herself tell the story of her life. Meanwhile, Kiki relates the tales Akiko has previously told her. Sold by her parents to a geisha house, beautiful young Yukiko used guile and sex to marry a rich businessman and become a respectable member of society. Akiko defied her mother and married for love, but her brilliant, unstable husband later abandoned her. As the past and present stories move awkwardly in tandem, Yukiko cancels her travel plans, and Kiki, still mourning Phillip, breaks up with Eric. Watching Akiko with a new love on a visit home, Kiki realizes that someday she too will move on from Phillip—and that, like Yukiko and Akiko, she will always be grateful for having loved at all. Trendy Asian elements do little to gussy up an unconvincing love story.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-11099-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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