Henshaw’s prose shimmers as his narrative becomes ever more nuanced, complex, and misleading.
Henshaw creates a world of psychological complexity and emotional subtlety in a story that moves from Paris to Japan and back again.
Auguste Jovert has been retired only a few months as inspector of police in Paris when he’s startled to receive a letter and photograph from his daughter, Mathilde, who only recently discovered her father’s identity. Thirty years earlier he’d worked in Algeria, where he met Mathilde’s mother. His immediate impulse is to crush the photograph and think it’s “too late,” and for a while, this particular mystery is put aside. Shortly thereafter, however, Jovert meets a neighbor, Tadashi Omura, a law professor at the Imperial University of Japan now living in Paris, who comes with his own cryptic issues about fathers and daughters. He spins a mesmerizing story about his relationship with Fumiko, whom he treats as a daughter though he claims she is not. In a series of detailed flashbacks he presents their relationship, on which one lie is piled onto another—for example, that Sachiko, Fumiko’s mother, died in childbirth. In the interstices of his long conversations with Omura, Jovert takes tentative steps to find Mathilde by using some of his contacts at police headquarters. Eventually the narrative of Omura’s past becomes ascendant and throws Jovert’s story into the background. We learn particularly lurid details about Omura’s friendship with Katsuo Ikeda, a brilliant student and friend of Omura’s, who becomes a writer and lives a profligate and amoral life, culminating in a murder. But with Omura, nothing is at it seems, and we find Ikeda’s life has also been constructed of elaborate fabrications.
Henshaw’s prose shimmers as his narrative becomes ever more nuanced, complex, and misleading.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-922182-34-0
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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