Journalist Lee (Atlantic Monthly, Los Angeles Times, etc.) uses his foreign correspondent experience impressively. Once he...
Second-novelist Lee (The Lost Tribe, 1998) spans three continents, mixing high-stakes suspense with erotic intrigue.
American news photographer and narrator Nicky Bettencourt is losing his edge, so his London boss at Newsweek hooks him up with the formidable US journalist Daniel McFarland. Daniel is about to leave his farmhouse outside Rome for Uganda, in hopes of tracking down the Reverend Okello, a self-styled prophet who has kidnapped tourists from a game park (yes, that really happened). The apprehensive photographer soon bonds with the fearless journalist, and they fly to a Ugandan refugee camp run by the British doctor Julia Cadell and financed by her lover, the billionaire banker Richard Seaton. Outraging Julia, Daniel bribes a child, a traumatized victim of Okello’s, to guide them to the prophet—anything for the story. But despite the dangers, he gets his interview, miraculously survives the crash of his Cessna, and loses his hard professional shell while recovering at an AIDS mission. All this is fine: a gripping storyline, rich with detail, shaped by a traveler who has talked the talk and walked the walk. Then the action shifts to Seaton’s English castle, where Daniel persuades the no longer outraged Julia to bolt (Nicky is the faithful witness). At the narrative’s still center, the new lovers shut out the world and enjoy a long idyll in their London hideaway—passages that call for a lyric intensity Lee can’t manage, and the story sags. It picks up again in the final section, where Lee re-creates another headline-grabber: the carnage attending East Timor’s independence. Julia has improbably agreed to run another of Seaton’s refugee camps there, and he and Daniel are both on hand, but the untangling of this three-way lovers’ knot is overshadowed by the real-world agony of the Timorese.
Journalist Lee (Atlantic Monthly, Los Angeles Times, etc.) uses his foreign correspondent experience impressively. Once he matches that with well-developed characters, we’ll be looking at a major talent.Pub Date: May 9, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-379-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
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