A moving first novel, about family life and its challenges and discontents, from an acclaimed short-story writer (The Summer Before the Summer of Love, 1995, etc.). It's the story of the Keller family of Madison, Wisconsin, throughout the 1960s and, briefly, afterward—especially during the watershed year 1963, when 12-year-old Suzanne Keller's high-strung mother Helen (that's right), helplessly mourning the death of her idol John F. Kennedy, retreats into the pattern of depression and eccentricity believed to date from her adolescence, when Helen's parents were killed in an automobile accident. The novel thereafter weaves forward and backward in time, as Suzanne (who narrates) recalls and evaluates her beautiful, unstable mother's effects on her patient husband Glen (a curious, conscientious optometrist), Suzanne'sclothes-and-boycrazy older sister Bonnie, and a vividly characterized clutch of neighbors and best friends, including a farmhouse full of disapproving paternal in-laws whose intolerant views of the free-spirited Helen emerge during a stingingly evoked Thanksgiving dinner. Swick's beautifully controlled plot shifts into high gear when Helen ``escapes'' with Suzanne in tow on an unannounced trip to her Nebraska hometown, and especially as the latter begins to piece together the long-buried facts of her mother's girlhood losses and later traumas. The car trip episode is perhaps a trifle too reminiscent of Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here, and Swick's generally successful use of '60s touchstone movies and music and culture references to denote specific years betray her into what seem like anachronisms (was the term ``wimp'' around much in 1963? was the phrase ``it really sucks'' really current in 1969?). These are the only blemishes on a novel that renders the stuttering momentum of family dynamics with equally warm emotion and relentless clarity. A heartening breakthrough into the longer form by a writer who's already a short-story master, and grows more accomplished with each book she produces. (Regional author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017434-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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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