If you've seen the title and the author's name and you're still reading, you must want the skinny. All right, then: former First Daughter Davis (A House of Secrets, 1991, etc.) has churned out a gloriously self-serious saga of sexual power and dependency that's neither as explicit nor as psychologically penetrating as 9´ Weeks- -much less the Story of O—but represents instead a triumph of marketing over insight and style. The clunkers start early on: in Chapter One, budding teen Sara Norton is already (in 1965) losing her innocence, ``although not quite so quickly as America.'' Stung by harassment into a need to control boys—mainly by learning how to work on the automobile engines that hold the key to their sexual identity—Sara, grown into an apparently poised Hollywood costume designer, is easy prey for rebel director Anthony Cole, whose bondage games (``Do you trust me enough to do things with me you've never done before?'') keep pushing her to surrender—to him, to threesomes including the lead actress in a film he's shooting in Paris and (later) the obliging orangutan trainer back in L.A.—and to her own need to lose control. Meanwhile, Sara's best friend, endlessly seducible Belinda Perry, has gotten tied up too, but only in order to get raped by Phillipe, the charismatic New Age spiritual huckster she's fallen victim to. The hard-won lesson Sara draws from their parallel—after she runs away from a dungeon in which that rascal Anthony's manacled and humiliated her in front of a mob- connected producer, his girlfriend, and two other high-living strangers—is that it's all the same thing: ``It's just another kind of bondage, you know?...It's just that I've been playing it out sexually, and—'' Heavy. So what's next? The Secret Diaries of Amy Carter? Chelsea Clinton in the House of Pain? America, America.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86953-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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