Editor and novelist White (American Fiction IV, 1993, etc.; the mystery A Brother’s Blood, 1996) describes the trial of a Catholic priest for sodomy and murder in a small Massachusetts town. Behind every good priest, in this country at least, stands an Irish widow with an iron and a broom. Maggie Quinn seems to fit the rectory housekeeper mold pretty well: Fiercely loyal to her employer, Father Jack Devlin, she nurses him when he’s sick, worries when he comes home late, and allows herself a drop of his Jameson’s now and again when his back is turned. A single mother from County Galway, Maggie left Ireland brokenhearted after her young son drowned. Once in the States, though, she went from bad to worse and finally ended up in a mental hospital after a failed suicide attempt. There she was found by Father Jack, who got her back on her feet and gave her a new lease on life. Now, though, her placid world starts to unravel anew when two former altar boys accuse Father Jack of rape. Maggie sticks by Father Jack even after he’s convicted and sent to jail, proclaiming his innocence to her neighbors and suffering no small humiliation as a result. But things become even more ominous when, while in prison, Father Jack is indicted again—this time for the murder of a 12-year-old boy. Again, Maggie comes to the priest’s defense, but some of the details of the case are troubling, even to her. Has she misplaced her trust? Or is it simply being tried? In the end, Maggie discovers that “faith” means a lot more than the Penny Catechism let on. Overlong and written in a rambling, anecdotal style (“Now Mrs. Burke had a son named Franny, and here’s where things take a bad turn”) that’s annoying. But White’s narrative is strong enough to overcome his own verbosity and provides some nice twists along the way.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019431-6
Page Count: 355
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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
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
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