Houston is a fine travel writer, but her characters are cardboard cutouts for every cliché of contemporary uplifting women’s...
Houston’s second novel (Sight Hound, 2005, etc.) combines thinly disguised travel essays with a new age romance as her heroine travels the world with one lover, then more or less settles down for another.
Narrator Pam is a California professor with a very flexible schedule, seemingly unlimited financial resources and an itch for roaming. Over 100 brief chapters follow her to various exotic locations, from Alaska to Bhutan to Patagonia to Tunisia, to name just a few—after a while the places begin to run together—where she gets to know the locals, enjoys the local food and usually has a lively adventure or inner awakening. Sometimes fearless, sometimes scared to death, the narrator (whose identity reads close to the author’s) doesn’t take herself too seriously during these quests, which often include near-death experiences, and she skillfully captures the essence of each place she visits. The descriptions of her plane rides, and aviation near-disasters, are often hilarious. But less humorous are the relationship issues Pam is working out as she approaches 50. She brags annoyingly about her many, many friends, including semi-famous literary ones, although none develop into actual characters—another case of names running together. But Pam’s romantic history is problematic. Her past includes a dead lover she idealizes. Her present, as the book opens, includes Ethan, a womanizing jerk whom women find incredibly desirable despite his lack of a discernable personality. After their drawn out breakup, she goes on a series of snidely described bad dates before she meets Rick, a “highbrow hick” with a Masters in philosophy and religion who makes custom wood flooring for a living. To Pam, he is the perfect mix of redneck and new age cowboy. The hitch is his 8-year-old daughter and his complicated connection to his ex-wife. Can Pam balance her need to explore the world with her desire for intimacy with homebound Rick?
Houston is a fine travel writer, but her characters are cardboard cutouts for every cliché of contemporary uplifting women’s fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-08265-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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