Witty, fast-paced fun: a great story (already winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) that keeps the tempo up and doesn’t take...
A kind of darkly comic Asian version of Midnight Express, as second-novelist Kneale (the Whitbread-winning English Passengers, 2000) describes a young Englishman trapped in Japan.
Daniel Thayne is your typical middle-class dropout. Shortly after leaving university, Dan decides to chuck England altogether, and eventually ends up in Japan. There, he finds work teaching English at the Vital School, a storefront operation patronized mainly by bored housewives and unmarried girls looking for foreign husbands. The wages are lousy, the students difficult, and Daniel is never paid on time. Why does he stay? Well, he’s lost his passport, for one thing. And he’s started going out with one of his students, for another. His girlfriend Keiko is pouty and immature, fond of Mickey Mouse and stuffed animals, but she’s cute and devoted to Daniel in a shy kind of way. Daniel, for his part, is far from being in love with Keiko, but he has few friends in Tokyo and depends upon her company. When she tells him she’s pregnant, he is shocked but agrees to do the right thing and marry her. Still, he begins to express reluctance when Keiko’s father sets up a wedding on a week’s notice. He becomes even more suspicious when Keiko’s family keeps him virtually locked up in their house in anticipation of the happy day. And he begins to panic outright when it becomes obvious that the family business involves shabby hotels in the bad part of town. It’s one thing to break an engagement—and another to walk out on a mobster’s daughter. Especially when you have no passport, your own parents don’t know where you are, and you don’t have a yen to your name.
Witty, fast-paced fun: a great story (already winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) that keeps the tempo up and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Kneale is out of the gate running.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-297-82899-1
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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