Even when repetitive (two stories about neurotical, sensitive piano-playing young boys?), the offerings are consistently...
The always-excellent Houghton Mifflin “Best,” with an entertaining twist.
Chabon offers a refreshing defense of “entertainment” in the introduction, arguing that determining the “best” stories is impossible. He instead presents those that simply pleased him most. The collection draws heavily from the requisite publications (the New Yorker, etc.) and the MFA feedline. Up-and-comers are rare. Working through the plentiful fractured-middle-class-family tales, we meet creepy animals (Kelly Link’s lovely, haunted “Stone Animals” and David Mean’s philosophy-infused “Secret Goldfish”) and even creepier people (Joy Williams’s razor-sharp strangeness in “The Girls” and Nathaniel Bellows’s tender portrait of loneliness and near-pedophilia, “First Four Measures”), as well as more straightforward, beautifully realized characters, from Tom Perotta, Lynne Sharon Schwartz and the short form’s impresario, Alice Munro. An equal number of stories feature exiles and the down-and-out and. Of these, Edward P. Jones’s gritty, heartfelt prison tale “Old Boys, Old Girls” and Charles D’Ambrosio’s spooky, endearing drifters in “The Scheme of Things” are notable, as are the immigrant tales from Rishi Reddi and David Bezmozgis. Linguistic innovation is evident throughout, from Reddi’s striking rendition of Indian English to the musical speech of George Saunders’s wonderful “Bohemians.” Genre-bending also appears throughout, at its best in the Calvino-esque series of parables in J. Robert Lennon’s “Eight Pieces for the Left Hand,” and the good humor of Tim Pratt’s Wild West fantasy “Hart and Boot.” Indeed, humor—from black-gallows to gentle chuckles—leavens the entire collection.
Even when repetitive (two stories about neurotical, sensitive piano-playing young boys?), the offerings are consistently interesting and often wonderfully weird.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-42349-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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