Although the pace lags in sections—notably a cross-country train tour which seems to occur in real time—all in all this is a...
Aging Japanese actor, a former silent-screen sex symbol, is offered a second chance at notoriety.
Revoyr’s third novel (Southland, 2003, etc.) is loosely based on a scandal of Hollywood’s silent era. It’s 1964, and Jun Nakayama, 73, is content to dwell in prosperous obscurity, monitoring his real-estate investments and hiking the Hollywood Hills. But troubling memories of his days as a controversial movie star resurface when journalist Nick Bellinger interviews Jun about his flaming youth and leading ladies, including siren Elizabeth Banks and Nora Niles, an ingénue dominated by a harridan of a stage mother. This being Los Angeles, Nick is shopping a screenplay with a star turn for Jun—as an elderly Japanese man who is mistaken for a former war criminal by his rural California neighbors. Although excited by the prospect of working again, Jun is loath to revisit the circumstances that prematurely curtailed his career in 1922. Seamlessly interwoven flashbacks detail Jun’s ascension to stardom despite anti-Japanese prejudice. Jun’s excitement almost overwhelms a nagging suspicion that a comeback might engender a deeper inquiry into Jun’s role in one of early Hollywood’s most lurid unsolved mysteries. Ashley Tyler, a British director, was found murdered in his bungalow. There are three suspects: Elizabeth and Nora, who each had romantic designs on Ashley, and Jun, Ashley’s rival for Elizabeth. All three are cleared, but Elizabeth drinks herself to death and Nora is forever consigned to her mother’s less than tender mercies. But the murder isn’t the only reason Jun is publicity shy. He harbors a guilty secret, which the hoopla surrounding a movie release will expose. Allowing a first-person narrator to withhold the truth until the climactic moment is a neat trick, one handily accomplished mostly through Jun’s convincing voice, which Revoyr conveys in lucid, precise and period-appropriate prose.
Although the pace lags in sections—notably a cross-country train tour which seems to occur in real time—all in all this is a pulse-quickening, deliciously ironic serving of Hollywood noir.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933354-46-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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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