Morris has all the tools. But they need sharpening, and better raw material.
A sprawling fifth outing from Oprah favorite Morris (Songs in Ordinary Time, 1995).
After serving 25 years for murder, 40-ish misfit Gordon Loomis—physically huge, emotionally withdrawn, and stunned by despairing guilt—is released from prison and returns to his Massachusetts hometown under the watchful eye and judgmental presence of his younger brother Dennis: a successful medical professional who has painstakingly distanced himself and his family from the stigma created by Gordon’s accidental smothering of a pregnant neighbor whose house he and another teenager had broken into. Morris’s eye for gritty detail and gift for springing successive narrative traps function almost perfectly in the opening chapters, which vividly render Gordon’s unease with family, co-workers (at the rundown market where he’s a bag boy), and neighbors—notably, foulmouthed adolescent Jada Fossum, who runs drugs to mollify a local dealer harassing her junkie mother, and Delores Dufault, Gordon’s former schoolmate and stubbornly devoted supporter, whose earnest offers of a new life with her constitute a bridge he cannot bring himself to cross. The juxtapositions of Gordon’s timidity with the encircling neighborhood world that keeps drawing him in reveal with poignant irony how his very selflessness and integrity keep getting him into trouble. A crush on a woman who’s beyond him ended, a vitriolic elderly neighbor’s hold over him broken, Gordon perseveres, gets his dream job—and then Morris drops the hammer. In its best pages this is a raw, painful story that carries a powerful emotional charge. But it’s marred by strident overplotting (a new crisis develops every few pages) and unconvincing characterizations, especially that of feral, street-smart Jada, who is, paradoxically, sentimentalized as cloyingly as your generic Dickensian waif. What Morris does with Delores and Gordon is infinitely truer and more moving—until a final-chapter resolution that’s almost insultingly phony.
Morris has all the tools. But they need sharpening, and better raw material.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03288-3
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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