Entertaining fluff—and sure to sell.
Clothes make the man . . . and the man makes the woman.
Or so thinks Seattle journalist Tracie Higgins, who keeps herself busy writing feature stories for a local newspaper, hanging out with an assortment of comical pals, and letting her slacker boyfriend Phil take advantage of her. When Tracie complains to her longtime best friend Jon, he wonders why women always fall for users and losers like Phil. Jon is a great guy who always does the right thing—from making a modest fortune in the city’s computer industry to visiting each of his several stepmothers and his own mom on Mother’s Day. But since he can’t get a date, he asks Tracie on a whim to make him over. She eagerly complies, tossing out his dorky khakis and company T-shirts in favor of unbuttoned black leather shirts and torn jeans, insisting that he get a sexy, spiky haircut, dubbing him Johnny in the name of ersatz badness, and setting him loose on the unsuspecting female population of Seattle. After some initial strikeouts, Jon hits pay dirt with Tracie’s buddy Beth, who announces some amazing news the very next morning: Jon is fabulous between the sheets. Tracie finally wises up and realizes what she’s been overlooking all these years. She’s in love. But will Jon believe it when a tell-all account of his makeover and subsequent bungling appears in the newspaper? Fresh and funny for the most part, although Goldsmith (The First Wives Club, 1992, etc.) supplies enough trendy cuteness to fill a shopping mall. And the story’s central conceit—that an intelligent, sensitive, kind, attractive, hard-working, loyal, rich guy who’s also great in bed would somehow be invisible to the opposite sex—boggles the mind and begs the question any post-teen female reader would scream at cheerfully oblivious Tracie: Are you crazy?
Entertaining fluff—and sure to sell.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94558-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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