Still, talent galore, and well worth the price of admission.
Twenty authors write in a hodgepodge of genres, in issue ten of McSweeney’s quarterly.
“I think that we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be, and I hope that if nothing else, this treasury goes some small distance toward reminding us of that lost but fundamental truth,” says editor Chabon. There’s certainly variety to this treasury: Glen David Gold’s hanging of an elephant is just the beginning of weirdness in a story that goes on to postulate that man-killing elephants the country over may be avengers of African murders long kept in elephant memory. Michael Crichton weighs in with a Chandleresque p.i. who loses his fee when he photographs the wrong thief for a client, then loses his girlfriend, then loses his sobriety. Chris Offutt contributes an amusing SF/ghost story/semi-memoir about a writer trying to produce a story for a collection edited by Michael Chabon, eventually getting so close to the deadline that he has to use a time machine to go back in time to inspire himself. Harlan Ellison’s spiritual search for the Core of Unquenchable Perfection will find hip-hop at the mountaintop, and the golden arches awaiting him. Aimee Bender adds a pseudo-detective who is investigating a couple found dead amid their collection of salt and pepper shakers: Is it double murder, or double suicide? Other pieces include mummies (Karen Jay Fowler), Nazis (Michael Moorcock), dream women (Sherman Alexie), and witches (Kelly Link). Unlike Henry James’s ghost stories—where genre was always used to access the literary—the emphasis here is on fun: but what about those who ask for more than that?
Still, talent galore, and well worth the price of admission.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-3339-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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