Softly served and easy to swallow, competent and pointless, these tales are adequate to their purpose, and each is ripe in...
The title, borrowed from a bit of pop music that editor Hornby (About a Boy, 1998) happens to have heard, is a tip-off: This anthology of younger, mostly English writers lacks an organizing theme, and without it the assemblage of pleasantly written stories seems vaguely aimless.
Hornby explains in his introduction that the collection was gathered and sold to benefit schools for autistic students like the one his son attends. Readers less motivated by the desire to make a contribution to this worthy enterprise than by the wish to find something new from a favorite emerging writer will find several reliable young names on display. Hornby contributes "NippleJesus," about a former bar bouncer hired as a security guard at an art gallery: Rube Meets Art, with some predictable catharses. David Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 1999) adds a desultory bit of ventriloquism, in a story told by a dog who discovers all the usual things about happiness and sadness and life while running very fast through the woods. Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 1999) presents a young man's troubled history with his sister, and Robert Harris (Archangel, 1998) records the amusing self-exculpation a prime minister presents to Parliament in the aftermath of his wild night with a 15-year-old girl. There's nothing new under the sun, it seems: These fictions trace the search for love and "connection" to something, and only Irvine Welsh (Filth, 1999, etc.) and Roddy Doyle (A Star Called Henry, 1999, etc.) bring an authentic graininess to the party. The charms here are more likely to be found in the method of presentation, the fluency and distinction of the voices, than in the stories themselves.
Softly served and easy to swallow, competent and pointless, these tales are adequate to their purpose, and each is ripe in hip if green in heart.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-57322-858-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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