Australian newcomer Wilder offers a pocketful of stories that read by and large like apprentice pieces culled, say, mainly from writer-to-be student days. ``Beach Report'' is a word-sprightly satire in the manner of Barthelme, about a TV-jaded society whose members are happy to have their thinking taken over for them by visitors in flying saucers; ``The Vampire's Assistant at the 157 Steps'' (a maker of cheap movies overstays his welcome in a friend's cliff-house) follows in the sometimes revelatory real-is-surreal path; and what may be the best piece in the book (``The West Midland Underground'') creates a pensive collage of self and place and history as its narrator contemplates a legendary rail system. Nods in the direction of science fiction, though, end up as self-limiting exercises, as in ``The Man of Slow Feeling'' (a man finds that his sense-responses are delayed for three hours after any stimulus) and ``See You Later'' (another sees things only from a point 200 years too early in time). ``The Girl Behind the Bar is Reading Jack Kerouac'' is a slight story that eats its own tail, as the reader of a girl's stories gets drawn into a reenactment with her of the sexual events she's predicted-created in them. ``Joe's Absence'' overprepares its way to its jejune and unconvincing point that a young man is more interested in a sneak-peek at a writer-friend's stories than in a chance with the writer-friend's girl; ``Hector and Freddie'' chronicles the sexual confusions of two repressed Oxford students, trying for thematic height and sexual candor but hitting short of the first and generally trivializing the second; and the callow and undergraduate-toned ``Aspects of the Dying Process,'' about sex and unrequited love among the very young, takes itself seriously in a way its people and material simply can't sustain (`` `How do you get your jeans faded like that?' he asked her''). Deeply uneven, wanting more time to age. The title story, by the way, in case you're wondering, is an ironic little one-pager, deliberately flat as a pancake.
Pub Date: July 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-30785-9
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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