In the absence of complex or sympathetic characters, the brightest lights here are the ones that hover just over a bowl of...
First-novelist Poirer (Naked Pueblo, 1999) offers up a desultory combination of the world-weary and the preposterous: a 14-year-old wiser than any adult, a western boy’s disenchantment with “sophisticated” life at an eastern prep school, and an eccentric doper who serves as his world’s moral center.
Ellis Whitman is the wealthy Arizona kid who grows up among the stunning natural beauties of the desert west and the funkier beauties on the home front. His mother Wendy is a former hippie who adopts New Age and self-improvement techniques as readily and fruitlessly as new men to replace her husband Frank. Meanwhile, Stephen Cagliano, a.k.a. Goat Man, tends to his goats and cleans the pool on a nonstop mellow high fueled by his killer “hybrid” weed. Initiated into dope smoking at 11, Ellis is improbably accepted at Pennsylvania’s Gates Prep, where everyone is absolutely pent-up and uptight about school work and tradition and stuff. But that’s no problem for Ellis, who, supplied with dad’s credit card and Goat Man’s hybrid weed, finds mastering upper-level algebra and Latin as easy as buying up reggae CD’s and beer. After a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit Frank and his heiress girlfriend Victoria, Ellis starts thinking the old guy may not be so bad. Breezing through midterms, Ellis comes home for a trek into Mexico, ostensibly to help a refugee woman across the border at night. But he’s bummed to find Goat Man smuggling coke instead. Back home, Mom is still such a mess that Ellis wonders if there’s something to staying sober and playing by the rules.
In the absence of complex or sympathetic characters, the brightest lights here are the ones that hover just over a bowl of weed, duly inhaling and holding their breaths for the 90 seconds it takes to glean enlightenment from this coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6680-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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