Despite Gayle’s stereotypical characterization of men as bumbling and clueless boys, Duffy’s well-enough drawn to be a...
Lightweight but touching modern relationship story, this time from a male point of view.
To get the obvious comparisons out of the way, British author Gayle’s first US publication (after a previous success, My Legendary Girlfriend, in the UK) isn’t as giddily amusing as Bridget Jones, nor as thoughtfully affecting as Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, and it isn’t as quirkily original as either one, but it has its own distinct hangdog charm. Here, Benjamin Duffy, almost 30, is an aspiring stand-up comic in London whose pleasantly low-key life is shaken up when Mel, his girlfriend of four years, proposes. Though he loves her, and doesn't want to contemplate life without her, Duffy panics at the prospect of marriage. Retreating to his sty of an apartment, shared with best mate and fellow aspiring comic Dan (having lost the woman he loved, Dan has adopted an I-am-a-beer-swilling-unlaundered-island posture), Duffy decides not to make Dan’s mistake—and so says yes. Mel soon detects he doesn’t really mean it, though, and, heartbroken, calls the whole thing off. With the counsel of his brother-in-law Charlie, Dan, along with a great many pints of beer, Duffy attempts to accept the situation, and begins seeing Alexa, “TV’s Hottest Totty,” while Mel starts to spend time with an old boyfriend. Thanks, however, to the hectoring of his sister, and the intervention of his mother, who arranges for her son to meet the father who abandoned them many years before, Duffy realizes that he is not his father—and no longer need fear failing Mel.
Despite Gayle’s stereotypical characterization of men as bumbling and clueless boys, Duffy’s well-enough drawn to be a winning Everyman, and readers will be cheering him on as he heads for his emotional growth spurt.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50100-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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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