Wearing its liberal heart on its sleeve, the 13th novel by National Book Award-winner Settle has the same historic sweep and personalized politics as her acclaimed Beulah Quintet (Charley Bland, 1989, etc.). Settle's protagonist is a woman of the century, a tough lady who, confronted by the major events of her time, feels the need to stand up and be counted. Her story begins in Richmond, Virginia, where Melinda Kregg slowly realizes there's more to life than debutante balls. After her father's death, Melinda devotes her exemplary life to assuaging her guilt over inheriting his ``blood money,'' made from investments in coal mines. As a Red Cross volunteer, she ventures to Kentucky, where she rebels against bureaucratic neutrality during a strike because it punishes innocent children. With no illusions about manipulative communists and fellow travelers—especially the lecherous Theodore Dreiser, who makes a cameo here—Melinda is changed by the murder of her party member lover. Run out of town, she eventually lands in Manhattan, where she adds auto mechanics to her diverse skills—all of which come in handy when she sets off for the Spanish Civil War. Amid a number of melodramatic gestures, Melinda meets her future husband, an English baronet who later becomes a saintly doctor in London and a pioneer of National Health. In Spain, Melinda adopts a speechless orphan. Years later, after her husband's death and her adopted daughter's move to the States, Melinda returns home for her last great struggle, the fight for civil rights. Again, she finds herself mothering an orphan, a young black man whom she supports through college and law school. Settle covers a lot of ground in her breathless account of romantic idealists in a tumultuous century. A counter-myth of the southern belle, this entertaining and fully imagined re-creation would make a great miniseries. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47699-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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