An effective, if melancholy portrait.
The bestselling author of The Horse Whisperer (1995) returns to the rugged American West for this story of a damaged family’s eventual redemption.
The surface of Evans’s latest is shaped as a mystery. Two skiers on the back trails in Montana find a body encased in ice, and it doesn’t take long for the authorities to identify her as Abbie Cooper, wanted for eco-terrorism and murder. Her parents come to claim her body: Ben from Santa Fe, where he lives with his lover Eve, Sarah from the now-empty family home in Long Island. Sarah’s cruel accusation that Ben is responsible for Abbie’s death spins the story back to when they were a happy family . . . or at least had the appearance of one. Ben was studying architecture and Sarah was in college when they met. They romanced in the usual way, married, had Abbie and Josh and moved to the ’burbs. But the façade of marital harmony shatters on Ben’s 46th birthday at the Divide, a Montana dude ranch, where he meets Eve. Everything that’s wrong with Ben and Sarah (a lot) finally becomes too much to bear. Abbie takes her parents’ split badly, and her youthful enthusiasm for saving the planet at the University of Montana turns dangerous after she meets Rolf, a cell leader for the Earth Liberation Front. When one of their fire-bombings goes wrong, Abbie and Rolf go underground to lead a quasi-criminal existence, despite her parents’ televised appeals to turn herself in. Part thriller, part family drama, the novel is at its best in the analysis of Ben and Sarah’s failed marriage. Evans examines in excruciating detail the intentional injury and petty selfishness that accompany their break-up. Abbie’s disappearance lasts for years, with the FBI still watching the Coopers. It’s up to Josh, shy and usually stoned, to bring the family some closure.
An effective, if melancholy portrait.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15206-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
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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