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Montpelier Tomorrow

An affecting, deeply honest novel; at the same time, a lacerating indictment of our modern health care system.

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After a woman’s son-in-law contracts amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, she tries to help the family, but the burdens of caregiving take her relationships to the breaking point.

Kindergarten teacher Colleen Gallagher, 53, is glad to help out when her daughter Sandy’s husband, Tony, gets a fatal diagnosis: ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease. With a newborn, a toddler, a high-pressure job and Tony’s medical procedures to manage, Sandy needs all the help she can get. Colleen is all too familiar with being a young widow left to raise small children on her own; her husband died in a car accident when Sandy was 5. Though Tony’s family and friends start out with optimism and good intentions, tempers are soon frayed and patience worn out by the constant demands of caretaking. Sandy is often angry and resentful; Colleen feels like a slave. In the end, the survivors will have to go on with their lives. MacDonald (co-author: The Quiet Indoor Revolution, 1992) gives an unflinching portrait of dealing with a debilitating chronic illness: the expense, the logistics, the red tape, and especially the brutal, exhausting, undignified truths of nursing: “None of the caregivers’ manuals mentioned the orange shit that oozed out Tony’s rectum only half-way so that I had to dig out the rest as I wiped his butt.” The characters have a maddening way of making things more difficult for themselves; despite Tony’s wealthy parents, all the household DIY chores—scraping plaster, sewing drapes, cleaning gutters—for some reason fall to Colleen. But it’s really health care that doesn’t make sense. Tony’s doctor recommends a life-prolonging feeding tube. Why? “Because doctors love technology. Also, she doesn’t have to live here,” a nurse explains. Commenting on Tony’s feeding chair, she continues, “When I started in this profession, you never would have seen equipment like that in a home. It doesn’t belong here.” MacDonald saves her debut novel from being too didactic by her well-rounded characters and Colleen’s complex, thoughtful responses to the untenable situation.

An affecting, deeply honest novel; at the same time, a lacerating indictment of our modern health care system.

Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2014

ISBN: 978-0990715818

Page Count: 318

Publisher: All Things That Matter Press

Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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