Witty, smart, and occasionally fascinating, Lefebvre’s novel becomes tiresome by the end.
The stream of consciousness of an unnamed, utterly obsessive woman on an airplane.
The narrator of Lefebvre’s first novel to appear in English has no name, no stated occupation. When this slim book begins, her plane is taking off from Berlin; it ends as she lands in Paris, her home. In between is a kind of cyclone of her thoughts, which circle obsessively around certain themes, certain images, without ever reaching any kind of consistency, let alone resolution. At the center of her thoughts is a man she refers to as “the pianist” or “the composer,” whom she saw in Berlin when, to her great regret and self-loathing, she talked too much. Other points of obsession include: the narrator’s education; her habit of not caring, a cardinal characteristic; the idea of collective happiness; the letters of Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno; and the self-portrait by Arnold Schoenberg, in which the composer appears in blue, with upturned nostrils and only one ear, which gives the book its title. It’s difficult to say how all of this ties together or whether, indeed, it does. It’s difficult to say what has actually happened and what the narrator has only imagined happening. It’s easy, too easy, to refer to all this as stream of consciousness, though there doesn’t seem to be a better phrase. There is pleasure to be found in the elegance and sophistication of the narrator’s thoughts. There is humor as well as pathos in her self-doubt. But her endless obsessing becomes tiresome in the same way it does in any friend, acquaintance, or person you’ve been seated beside on an airplane. You long for a breath of air, for some calm. Lefebvre fits a lot into her slim little novel—but she never achieves calm.
Witty, smart, and occasionally fascinating, Lefebvre’s novel becomes tiresome by the end.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945492-10-5
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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