A moving, entertaining set of stories from a notable new voice.
Martin’s debut story collection chronicles the wayward lives of children and adults in rural Pennsylvania.
These nine stories rarely leave the confines of the western part of the Keystone State, but all their characters dream of escape in various ways. For some, this means running off to college; for others, it simply means sitting in a junkyard Bonneville, imagining they’re a character in The Dukes of Hazzard, speeding away. The 10-year-old narrator of “Seventy-Two-Pound Fish Story” yearns so much for a meaningful father-son excursion that he begins conflating fact and fantasy. The adults in the story, who mostly remain in the background, do this as well. In “You Gotta Know When To Hold Them,” a mother loses herself in sanguine romantic novels and fantasies of a better life while refusing to believe it’s possible for her son to have head lice. Likewise, the mother in “Dreamland,” as the title suggests, is so lost in her own alcoholic world that she can no longer see the consequences of her actions. Although these narratives of struggle and desire might sound bleak in summary, Martin is smart enough not to let his stories be overtaken by sentimentality or despair. Nor does he attempt pat endings full of epiphanies or moments of transcendence. Instead, these stories achieve the far-too-uncommon accomplishment of realistically and lovingly depicting everyday people as they stumble and try to break free of their bonds. For example, readers will recognize the adolescent who can’t stand his ex-girlfriend but nevertheless wonders “if she would still have sex with him.” Refreshingly, Martin’s writing not only contains deep currents of empathy, but is also consistently vivid and alive, whether it’s capturing the stilted dialogue of teenagers or pausing to consider the small wonders of the world (as when a fishing line flies out “like a slow breath”). In short, the stories in this collection often feel heartbreakingly real in the best possible way: they show readers humans, flawed and frustrated, just trying to survive.
A moving, entertaining set of stories from a notable new voice.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-29400-0
Page Count: 135
Publisher: Braddock Avenue Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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