The rare one-joke book that never gets old, with a pleasingly tangy aftertaste.
As heard on This American Life, here’s a little something for any who’ve ever had a “friend” whose amazing life made their own seem pathetic.
Set up as a one-way conversation, with the protagonist never heard but always painfully felt, the story takes some generationally specific insecurities and spins them into a novel about growing up in the 1990s and never getting anywhere. The never-heard-from victim is a woman graduating from Clarkwell College in 1990 and doomed to make a career out of a degree in Folk & Myth, only to be subjected to a series of interactions over the following years with the titular Underminer, a diabolically manipulative “best friend” who’s always there to remind the victim just how ludicrous her life is, though she’s never without a smile on her face. Underminer reminds the victim of her relationship missteps (“they were really close all through freshman year before you grabbed him I mean pinned him down I mean started dating him”), fashion miscues, personal hygiene problems (“Did you throw up? No, no I just smelled throw-up for a second”) and weight issues (“You look sexy the way your body looks now. You’re not too fat”). The dialogue rolls forward through 15 years, the victim bumping into the Underminer at every passing cultural signpost (indie filmmaking, Burning Man, Internet dating), always half a step behind and terminally clueless. Her friends all go on to bigger and better things while her band comes to naught, her poetry doesn’t pan out, and before long she’s a cater-waiter at glamorous parties the Underminer is almost too cool to attend. Comic monologist and fiction author Albo (Hornito, not reviewed) and Heffernan, Albo’s co-writer and TV critic for the New York Times, skillfully mine the slacker generation’s insecurity—with its need to be in on the next big thing without appearing to care—and add a spicy dash of psychological tension as the Underminer cheerfully chips away at every facet of the victim’s desires and achievements until little is left. Yet funny.
The rare one-joke book that never gets old, with a pleasingly tangy aftertaste.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-484-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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