Enough sumptuous prose poetry to sate the most demanding palate, though some readers will feel restless long before the...
An ambitious fantasy on situations and themes from The English Patient, transplanted to 1809 New York, yields mixed results.
As the Napoleonic Wars cast their shadow over the young country in the form of an inconvenient trade embargo with nearby Canada and renewed Indian unrest provoked by white men’s quarrels, John Frayne returns to the town of New Forge to reclaim the property his father forfeited when he would not take a loyalty oath. Purchasing the right to feed and clothe a pair of indigents, an elderly family friend and a young mute woman first glimpsed pushing the body of her mother into a hole in the frozen lake, Frayne moves into Bay House and sets about making a family. But families are hard for Frayne, who left his first wife, Hester, when she took a lover, and survived a second wife, Tacha, whom he took while living among the Indians. And tensions mount when he finds Hester still involved with the same man, and their son Tim, ten, full of hate for the father who aches to reclaim him. Instead, Frayne devotes himself to Jennet, the mysterious outcast he has taken in, a woman as damaged as he is. As love blooms between them, Lawrence (The Burning Bride, 1998, etc.) cuts away repeatedly to focus on Frayne’s landlord and enemy, scheming shopkeeper Herod Aldrich, who dreams of unlimited wealth and power, and crippled furniture maker Marius Leclerc, who dreams only of shaking off the nightmarish miracle of his surviving Austerlitz. After a glacially slow beginning, Lawrence goes back to the well of memory to dredge up secret after damning secret about the characters. But she’s no Michael Ondaatje, and her melodramatic climax provides more relief than fulfillment.
Enough sumptuous prose poetry to sate the most demanding palate, though some readers will feel restless long before the seventh course arrives.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-380-97621-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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