Classy stuff that deserves tons of flowers from dazed and satisfied readers.
Laugh-out-loud debut fiction by a four-time Emmy winner and humorist (Merrill Markoe’s Guide to Love, 1997, etc.).
An art teacher writes annual reports on her birthday so she won’t be condemned to repeat her screwed-up life. Her entries run from thirty f**king six to fortymmmmppphhh. There is no way she can avoid her ghastly parents, a mother who makes her cringe in restaurants (“ . . . maybe the waiters and waitresses will think I am [Dad’s] child by a previous marriage”), and a father who gives excruciatingly detailed orders to busboys (“Listen to me carefully so I don’t have to eat my lunch soaking wet . . . . If you don’t hold that pitcher with two hands how the hell do you expect to get any directional stability when you pour?”). “So these were my parents, the people put on earth to judge me, to advise me, to correct me, to mold me in their image.” Each birthday the teacher’s painfully boorish ex-boyfriend Carl sends her an oversized birthday bouquet of seasonal flowers—and each birthday she has high hopes that this year the dumb girl in her will finally die. Can she stay out of the Hole where divorcées and singles in the their late 30s and beyond sit whining to each other that they haven’t had sex in four years? She has really, really, really bad sex with a guy in her acting class who has no idea at all where anything is on a woman. “If he wired a car the same way he made love, the windows would open and close when he pressed on the accelerator.” For her thirty f**king eighth birthday, her parents take her out. When Dad triumphantly spots a 72-cent error in the bill, calls the waiter, then the manager, Mother swells, as proud of her man as if he’d pulled her from a burning building.
Classy stuff that deserves tons of flowers from dazed and satisfied readers.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50712-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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