Enjoyably dozy and slight, like a long afternoon in the south Florida sun.
Undercover goings-on at an exclusive Florida gated community.
One would imagine there’d be pretty much nothing happening on the happy little fictional isle of Eden, a haven just off the Florida coast for richer-than-Croesus types who want to live in a place that’s “like a Caribbean resort only without the poverty, dodgy politics and truculent natives”—and one would pretty much be right. But that doesn’t stop Mewshaw (Shelter From the Storm; Do I Owe You Something?: A Memoir of the Literary Life, both 2002) from trying to rustle something up. At the eye of the yuppified storm is Frank Pritchard, a retired CEO forced out of his company by some less-than-ethical types, whose loving wife died not so long ago. He spends his days talking with his friend, the Black Widow–like Randi Dickson, hanging out with his dead wife’s therapist (whom he likely has feelings for), and thinking about killing himself. His neighbor is Cal Barlow, a wheelchair-bound loner who plays around with his pistol when he thinks nobody is watching. Frank and Cal strike up a friendship, the two becoming interested romantically in Randi at about the same time, and, all the while, Cal’s secret identity, that of a drug dealer in the Witness Protection Program, is about to blow up in his face. The story noodles along at first, content with the easygoing rhythms of Cal and Frank’s friendship, the sunny idleness of Eden’s vacuous luxury, and its residents’ ill-hidden fear of the outside world and, indeed, reality. But when Frank decides to stir things up a bit by going on an ill-advised graffiti campaign around the island, unwanted attention is the result—and things decline from there. Mewshaw has an easier way with his story this time, his tenth outing, than in his last: little here feels forced, and the context is so powerfully evoked it overwhelms what little plot there is.
Enjoyably dozy and slight, like a long afternoon in the south Florida sun.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15221-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
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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