Despite some fine journalistic passages about the Baratan exile community's fierce nostalgia, rage, and tackiness, Medina...
Felix Nogara has returned to Barata, Cuba, after the death of its Marxist dictator Campion (a double for guess who).
He had left when he was sent at 12 to stay with relatives in Miami, an uncle who used to be a political executioner on the island and then glided into drug-dealing in the US. Given his high-risk environment there, Felix's Florida vacation is predictably short, and he soon makes his way with barely provisioned independence to New York, where he works in a warehouse and begins writing poetry, driven by the example of his great-grandfather, the actual author of the classic lyrics of Barata's poet-laureate (read Martí). But his loneliness makes him vulnerable to an anti-Campion exile group that enrolls him as a bomb-maker. He sets off devices aimed both at rival exile guerrilla groups in the story’s byzantine political landscape and at his own unresolved anger. Never quite sure what he’s doing in any given society, Felix has the true orphan's velleity, but he does understand from his father's history lessons that his Baratan soul, like his father's, consists of equal parts sentimentality, kitsch, and astounding talent for both loyalty and martyrdom. When he finally returns to the island—“returning was like going back to Eden. It was like showing God who was really in control”—things are just as muddled, and Felix finds himself enrolled in political factionalism depressingly similar to what's come before.
Despite some fine journalistic passages about the Baratan exile community's fierce nostalgia, rage, and tackiness, Medina (The Marks of Birth, 1994) never finds a stable tripod for all his shuttling back and forth between exile and home, past and present. There's forced whimsy, García Márque–zlike historical sweep, and existential notes, but nothing hangs together.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-89255-251-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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