While readers may sometimes have to resist the urge to throttle Will, Gayle pokes enough fun at his character’s self-induced...
Londoner loser obsesses over the loss of the love of his life, in a slight but not unlikable marriage of Nick Hornby and romantic-comedy clichés.
Will Kelly is miserable and hasn’t a clue what he’s going to do with his life. His girlfriend of three years, Agnes (Aggi), dumped him on his 23rd birthday. Now his 26th is coming up and he’s just as fixated on her as ever. We meet Will as he’s finishing up another week at a job he hates—teaching English to unruly 14-year-olds—and heading back to his sordid flat for a weekend of depression. Although he seems to have enough to be upset about already—miserable job, horrible living situation, dead broke—he’s managed to make things worse. In a sad attempt to rid himself of Aggi, he had a one-night stand with the needy and tear-prone Martina, who’s now calling him nonstop. And he’s made an ass out of himself bumming smokes from children at his school. There’s an illusory ray of sunshine in the form of Kate, a girl who used to live in his flat and once called to see if any mail had come for her. A few marathon phone sessions later, Will is convinced he’s falling in love with Kate. But the memory of Aggi won’t die. It’s difficult to feel much sympathy for a character so desperate and clinging, not to mention one saddled with an attitude full of, as he puts it, “sheer blatant crapness.” But Gayle is smart enough a writer not to make too big a deal out of these failings, and he packs all the love and despair into one long, revelation-heavy weekend.
While readers may sometimes have to resist the urge to throttle Will, Gayle pokes enough fun at his character’s self-induced and hilariously pathetic predicament to make this a genial time-killer.Pub Date: July 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0973-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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
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