Brotherly love never hurt so good.
The messy realities of life and death intrude on a family’s deeply held rationalizations.
Hawley (Other People’s Weddings, 2004, etc.) creates an unsettling, caustically funny portrait of contradictory siblings at odds with themselves, their lovers and their wildly dysfunctional relatives—imagine the family showdown from a Sam Shepard play infused with the more sophisticated existential crises of Tom Perrotta’s novels. The animated preamble opens on Valentine’s Day to find David and Scott Henry waiting in the harsh light of an emergency room, one with a broken nose, the other with a broken fist. “Now that you know what happens,” Hawley writes with a wink, “it’s time to start this story where all good stories should start. In the middle.” Scott doesn’t believe in the basic decency of human beings, least of all himself with his pathetic job (eavesdropping on customer service calls) and his cheating harpy of a girlfriend. Brother David is the proverbial family man, but he’s got a secret. The traveling salesman has and holds dear not one but two families, both with children, one on each coast just to be safe. His anxiety and fears about being discovered are at war with his desire to be free of all his burdensome responsibilities. “You think it’s the hardest thing in the world, to change your life, but really it’s as easy as falling downhill,” Hawley informs us. “All you have to do is let go.” The untimely death of their father inspires an ill-advised road trip with their bitter, alcoholic mother. Subsequent misadventures ultimately lead to one man’s expression of grief in a strip club, another’s unlikely encounter with a higher power and, finally, that world-shattering punch. Hawley’s interruptive ruminations on the nature of time, storytelling and universal truth occasionally threaten to derail his narrative, but the fractured appeal of these rival siblings runs as deep as their angst.
Brotherly love never hurt so good.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8118-6429-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
