A magnetic first novel combining wit, sex, and apocalyptic reverie.
A gripping account of the intricately woven mind of a teenager.
In small-town Minnesota, Colin is not much more than a troubled preteen with an older sister, Heather, who resents him (and everything else), an older brother, Paul, who has autism, parents who grow increasingly distant as time passes, friends he can’t rely on, and a budding, unruly sexuality. When his father commits suicide, Colin is forced to pick up the pieces of his broken family while contemplating both his own death and homosexuality. “It was impossible for a boy to just grow into a new face, a new body and skin….In the world he imagined, boys stepped out of their old skin and that was the end.” If only it were as easy as shedding an old skin for a new one. Simultaneously, Colin's mother, Diane, faces similar issues—though on an adult scale. She begins therapy sessions to deal with grief, picks up unhealthy habits, and gets significantly closer to Colin, neglecting her other two children. Colin and Diane quickly form a redoubtable duo—though much of their development happens when they are separated—that turns its back on societal expectations. For Diane, Colin is her peer—and vice versa. The result is intoxicating. Nathan has crafted an all-consuming novel in which topics like suicide, homosexuality, parenting, friendship, and psychology make up a precarious tableau in which readers can leave their own subjectivity behind and experience the world from Colin’s singular viewpoint. “Nobody caught the names he called himself. Nobody saw him put his hands together and nobody knew what god he prayed to, what promises he made. Nobody saw him unfold his hands and look at his wrists where the blood flowed fragile and breathless and blue….Nobody knew was he was thinking.”
A magnetic first novel combining wit, sex, and apocalyptic reverie.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-798-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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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