Despite the occasional clinker, this bittersweet world of average folks just trying to get by is well worth the visit.
Novelist White (The Blind Side of the Heart, 1999, etc.) offers an uneven collection of 12 stories about ordinary people suddenly blind-sided by the vagaries of life.
In the masterfully told “Disturbances,” a North Carolina doctor and part-time medical examiner is called out in the middle of the night to officially pronounce dead a young man shot in the chest by his Cherokee Indian wife. Inside the mobile home, Doc encounters the stricken woman trying to nurse her baby—and suddenly he has a different job to perform. In “Burn Patterns,” an arson investigator shares a six-hour drive across dark, icy Pennsylvania with an angry, snake-fondling vagabond named Rosemarie. In “Crossing,” recently widowed Margaret confronts her loneliness on a queasy ferry ride across Long Island Sound. Meanwhile, a landscaper has a most unpleasant task in “Ray’s Shoes”: he has to tell his neighbor, a grieving widower with two young daughters, that he’s becoming too emotionally attached to his own wife. “The Cardiologist’s House” takes us inside the sad life of a retired high-school teacher who, after two heart attacks, must watch from his living-room window as his neighbor and former lover struggles through a new affair. A pair of stories touchingly explore the fears of fatherhood: In “The Smell of Life,” Ira is awakened from a nightmare about his father's death when his newborn daughter cries; in “Instincts,” a widowed father has to explain the facts of life to his daughters during an outing to the zoo. A few pieces fall back on stock characters and tired situations: “Marked Men,” for example, is yet another comparison of Vietnam to WWII. The listless and rambling “Three Whacks a Buck” takes us back to the early ’60s, when fears of nuclear bombs and boys troubled the hearts of preadolescent girls.
Despite the occasional clinker, this bittersweet world of average folks just trying to get by is well worth the visit.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8262-1294-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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