The quirkiness feels forced, the sex dreary. Pritchard fans will be disappointed.
A middle-aged romance writer’s affair with a younger man feeds her fiction in Pritchard’s third novel (Selene of the Spirits, 1998, etc.), which aspires to comment on the genre.
Single mother Prudence True Parker teaches Advanced Personal Journey at an Arizona community college, not a gig that’s exactly making her rich. In the public toilet of her local library, she has a chance encounter with cross-dressing Digby Deeds, better known under the name “Mildred Crawley” as a wildly successful romance author. Whimsically insisting their meeting was “divinely ordained,” the dying Digby/Mildred asks Prudence to complete his Savage Passion series. All she has to do is flesh out the plots he bequeaths her, and her financial worries will end. Then, while volunteering (for reasons too strained to recount) at an Indian charity event in Oklahoma, Prudence meets Ray Chasing Hawk, a handsome if slightly androgynous Comanche with whom she shares a night of passion. Returning home to Tempe, she resumes teaching and raising her increasingly independent 17-year-old daughter Fiona. But soon Ray comes calling, and before long he’s moved in. Quite a handy coincidence, since Mildred Crawley planned her next book as a white woman/Indian chief romance. Pritchard contrasts that fantasy passion with Prudence’s less-than-perfect affair with Ray, who is angry, narcissistic, secretive about his friendships with other women, and perfectly willing to live off her money. Readers may be as bewildered as Fiona by her mother’s enthrallment, though she herself (seen as a kind of Prudence-lite) has not chosen much better. Prudence gains new respect for Ray after he undergoes the demanding rites of the Sun Dance Ceremony, and Pritchard’s depiction of the Native American culture, refreshingly politically incorrect at first, now becomes sentimentally reverential. When he discovers that Prudence has been using him as a model for her fiction, Ray feels used, but tensions are all too easily resolved.
The quirkiness feels forced, the sex dreary. Pritchard fans will be disappointed.Pub Date: March 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50304-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 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
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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