Ambitious, and usually on the mark: a novel that demands the reader’s participation, and that repays it well.
A richly detailed historical novel, set in a nation drifting toward civil war, that picks up where Kingman’s Not Yet Drown’d (2007) leaves off.
Grace Pollocke is a woman of parts: An artist of much accomplishment, raised in Europe and the Indies, she serves on the home front in Philadelphia while her seafaring husband wrests their fortune from the ports of Asia. Out there on the main, a young African American woman has been making her mark as well, and she returns to the New World with the promise that the silkworms in her hold can bring new wealth to a homegrown industry growing ever more reliant on slave-picked cotton. And there’s a rub, for Anibaddh Lyngdoh, it turns out, has released herself from slavery on her own recognizance—“taking of her freedom,” as one character says, “all those years ago in Scotland”—and now she’s caught up in the intricacies of the law concerning runaway slaves, since no good deed goes unpunished. Enter Grace, whose family history is bound up in Anibaddh’s in ways of which she is only dimly aware, and who turns up a few secrets as she learns more about those crossed destinies. Kingman works in the big ideas of slavery and complicity in it, skillfully depicting, for instance, the self-deceptions that afford one good Christian gentleman in Virginia biblical approval of the curious institution of human enslavement. Kingman channels the conventions of period prose into her own, so that her novel proceeds at the very leisurely, pre-television, pre-automobile pace of 19th-century storytelling. Her prose, too, is perhaps more stately than is the contemporary norm, as when she writes of Grace, “She preferred to blow out the candle when they made love, not from bashfulness, but to retire her eyes, just temporarily; to retire the greedy domineering eyes which swamped all the senses otherwise.” The reader unused to such slow and careful language may be impatient at turns, but, as Frederick Busch does in The Night Inspector, set in about the same time, Kingman handles it well and without anachronism.
Ambitious, and usually on the mark: a novel that demands the reader’s participation, and that repays it well.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06547-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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