Amusing—but 400 pages of chat is too much. Even the big tragic scene that accounts for Laurie’s character feels lost in the...
Second outing by the author of the comic paranoid thriller A Conspiracy of Tall Men (1998).
At 36 and unmarried, wedding photographer Laurie has captured other people’s vows at over a thousand weddings during the past ten years. Not just vows but also “the future as a hot green meadow that rolls on for years. And I step up and capture it in one-five-hundredth of a second.” Looking over old work, Laurie wonders how many of these vows have held. Many have, and these folks are delighted by her offer of a free photo of them in their home today. Laurie photographs divorcées alone as “last standing.” Hollow 35-year-old ex-husbands hit on her. Her own loneliness doesn’t interest her; “it’s just a dead body handcuffed to my wrist.” Father went insane, mother died of cancer, younger sister Lisa can’t straighten out the men in her life. We find that Laurie was married for 14 months but never owns up to it. Then she spies Gilligan Ford III, a handsome smiling stranger, 42, who crashes weddings. She goes through her files and finds that he has crashed 11 of her last 12 weddings. At the latest Hindu affair, he tells he that he actually does know someone, having been introduced to him a half hour earlier. Doesn’t know his name, though. She accepts his dinner invitation. He takes her to the closed aquarium (for which he’s an accountant?), where he’s had a duck dinner set out by the shark tank. Her glass shell splinters. His wife died of cancer five years ago. Lisa uncovers that Gil has inherited his dead wife’s wealth. When Gil wants to know how Laurie knows this, she hides Lisa’s shame—and soon true love goes far astray.
Amusing—but 400 pages of chat is too much. Even the big tragic scene that accounts for Laurie’s character feels lost in the swash. Too many subplots, Mozart!Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32273-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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