Parker does a fine job exploring Joel’s pain, but the overworked music/love connection is not enough to give his story...
Soul music acts as a lifeline for a tormented adolescent whose family is disintegrating.
Three things about this very short novel hit you immediately. The first is the voice of the narrator, 14-year-old Joel Junior; the second is the invocation of America’s rhythm-and-blues singers; and the third is the terrible plight of Joel and his little brothers, Carter and Tank. For his fifth work of fiction, Parker (Towns Without Rivers, 2001, etc.) takes us back to Trent, North Carolina. Joel’s daddy is not right in the head. When he’s having one of his spells, he hears voices; he has destroyed the TV with his golf clubs, though he hasn’t (yet) laid a hand on his kids. Joel’s mama was the first to jump ship, followed by her firstborn, Angela. Now Joel is father and mother to both his kid brothers. He expresses perfectly his lost Southern self, as he tries to make sense of the inexplicable. What sustains this beaten-down white boy is his love of the great black soul singers, a taste he has inherited from his father, who has just broken down again. Fearing the worst, Joel bundles his brothers into the pickup, but Carter gets loose; their daddy ties him up and cuts his hair, snipping off an earlobe. Joel has seen enough; he drives Tank and himself to the coastal town where Angela is waiting tables, but she’s a tough cookie and disinclined to help. After failing to track down their mother, Joel and Tank return home to a catastrophe. That’s not much storyline in a novel that is all about love: love promised, love withheld, love struggling against the odds.
Parker does a fine job exploring Joel’s pain, but the overworked music/love connection is not enough to give his story ballast.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-484-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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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