Cunningham (At Home at the End of the World, 1990) adds a gay spin to the dysfunctional family genre with a novel that typically blames Mom and Dad, especially Dad, for everything that goes wrong. Moving through time with the speed of a spinning calendar in an old movie, Cunningham takes the Stassos family from 1935 to 2035, when Jamal, the only surviving grandson, scatters the ashes of Uncle Will Stassos and his lover Harry on the ocean. In between, the Stassoses experience all the psychic and physical ills that afflict the American family in the late 20th century—ills that, with few exceptions (AIDS being the rare one), are caused by the family itself, beginning in Greece with the beatings eight-year-old Constantine Stassos receives from his father. As soon as he can, Constantine flees to the US, where, in 1949, he meets Mary, daughter of Italian immigrants. The two soon marry; three children, Susan, Billy, and Zoe are born; and a lucky meeting with a fellow Greek, also working in construction, leads to affluence and middle- class respectability—but not to happiness, as the family rapidly falls apart. Mary increasingly avoids Constantine, who in turn seeks comfort from adolescent Susan, who as soon as possible marries Todd, whose major fault seems to be that he's decent, works hard, and wants to help others. Billy fights with his father, changes his name to Will, and comes out of the closet. Baby Zoe heads to New York, where she takes drugs, hangs out with Drag Queen Cassandra (the only credible character here), and bears Jamal, whose father is an African-American. Mary and Constantine divorce, but life won't get much better for them or their kids. Only Will will find true love. Stock characters and equally stock situations do little to help a breathless tale that, despite its gay sympathies, is just an old-fashioned melodrama in contemporary drag. (First printing of 75,000; Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-18113-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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