Slick and quick.
Britisher Gayle (My Legendary Girlfriend, 2002) bowls another one down the lad-lit lane with this slight and lighthearted riff on fatherhood.
Dave, the Trinidadian music critic for Louder, “the magazine for people who live music,” and Izzy, his Anglo-Welsh-Polish wife, the deputy editor of the glossy women’s magazine Femme, are “poster children for the twin-income no-kids generation”—until the evening they set out to disprove an article Izzy has just edited on the decline in sexual activity among thirtysomething couples. Within weeks, the two are awaiting the results of a home pregnancy test. Dave finds himself more excited than Izzy about pending parenthood, and he writes a syrupy letter that begins, “Dear Foetus . . . .” When Izzy miscarries, Dave is eager to try again. Not she. Crisis Number One. Then Louder folds, and Dave slides into writing “sensitive male” articles for Femme and sitting in as an advice columnist at Teen Scene. He’s a surprise success at “Love Doctoring,” and his teenaged readers include one Nicola O’Connell, who writes him a letter identifying herself as Dave’s love-child, the result of a one-night stand with her mother in 1986 in Corfu. She’s recognized him from the photo on his column. Dave begins a clandestine parenting relationship with Nicola, meeting at a Burger King and beginning to feel like her father. But what to tell Izzy? All this is sappy at times, but Gayle is most nuanced in detailing Dave’s growing attachment to his daughter, and the complications her existence—and his secrecy—bring to his marriage. Along the way, the story’s enlivened by witty and knowing descriptions of the magazine world, including a sardonic pastiche of articles written from the sensitive guy’s point of view (“Women and the messages they leave on men’s answerphones”) and samples from Dave’s column (“Dear Love Doctor Dave, My dad caught me and my boyfriend lying on my bed kissing and he went ballistic. . . .”).
Slick and quick.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7766-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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