A beautifully written, engrossing family epic that’s a bit slow and tangled with its own literary devices.
A slow, sweeping family tale spanning continents and generations.
Young’s debut novel first centers on Bernard, a sensitive carpenter in 1950s Canada. Though he’s deaf, he hears a melody one night as he slumbers. The haunting song leads him to a long sojourn in the woods, where he stumbles upon decades-old secrets. But he’s not the only one in his family enchanted by a distant, dreamlike tune. The tale jumps back and forth in time and geography, with his family’s story beginning in a French convent in 1859 and ending in present-day Australia. Bernard’s family is carefully traced, and the relationships among its members are revealed in elegant, finely crafted prose. There’s Adrienne, a French nun grappling with her vows; Isabelle, a young orphan who leaves Europe for Canada with a mysterious uncle; and Walk-Tall, a young Iroquois man with a tragic end. There are others, too, and their stories—illicit love affairs, sham marriages, mission trips to Asia—are set against a background of war, religion and, most importantly, music. Everyone is in some way connected to a guitar, either as a virtuoso or a child of one. Every guitar, it seems, is magical—when they’re in need of comfort or guidance, characters constantly swear they’ve heard their guitar play on its own—and the instruments are considered the most prized possessions, worshipped for their sound (“angels and ordinary men wept from the sheer beauty”) and sentiment. That adulation can be a bit much; some characters even sleep with their guitars like blankets, and one character’s playing unrealistically creates peace between angry Nepalese soldiers and traveling missionaries. Beyond the power of music and the nostalgia of familial possessions, the story’s progress often feels like an afterthought to Young’s focus on symbolism. Guitars might be what bind this family, but for the story, they’re more of a hindrance than an adhesive.
A beautifully written, engrossing family epic that’s a bit slow and tangled with its own literary devices.Pub Date: June 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1592999378
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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