Thurm revisits favorite themes (death, interracial marriage, life in New York) in her characteristically lighthearted way in her fourth novel (The Way We Live Now, 1991, etc.), this featuring a Manhattan psychic who chats with ghosts and interferes compulsively with the lives of those he loves. Victor Mackenzie was eight years old when he saw his first ghost: that of Murray Weinbaum, recently deceased owner of the corner candy store, an ordinary fellow with whom the young boy had always felt a certain rapport. Murray's ghost acts as a guardian spirit, watching over Victor as he grows up clairvoyant to become a hip, high-priced, but very honorable psychic in trendy downtown Manhattan. Katha Randall, struggling New York artist and single mother, has no interest in psychics, but she hears such good things about Victor's sessions that she takes her best friend Lucy to see him on Lucy's birthday. After predicting rough waters in Lucy's apparently perfect marriage (Lucy, a black woman, is wed to Buddy Silverman, a successful white dentist), Victor falls in love with Katha despite the fact that her palm reveals that she's newly divorced and now living with another man. Soon Katha has started to love Victor back, and must struggle with the fact that she'll never know how much he's manipulating her life or how many of her secrets he's managed to intuit. Much unconvincing angst arises from this uncertainty (along with some minor meddling by Murray and other ghosts) before Victor's devotion to Katha, his obvious fondness for her daughter, and his good-natured efforts to save Lucy's marriage convince Katha that a psychic boyfriend with a heart of gold is (surprise!) better than a life of penury, loneliness, and regret. Like its protagonists, Thurm's latest is as brisk, charming, and good-natured as they come—but so slight that it leaves only a phantom aftertaste on the literary tongue.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-944072-72-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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
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