As an astute judge of character, Everett recognizes that wounds are an essential part of the human condition. The...
Frontier justice takes a contemporary turn in this Western novel of literary ambition and psychological depth.
Amid the wilds of Wyoming, the latest from the prolific Everett (American Desert, 2004, etc.) finds racists and homophobes supplanting cattle rustlers as threats to societal stability. The novel’s first-person narrator is John Hunt, a horse trainer who specializes in problem animals and a rancher who seems to attract human strays. As a strong man who does a tough job in a hard place, the uncommonly reflective widower reveals himself slowly. He’s one of the few black residents in a region of whites and American Indians. He’s also far better educated than most of his neighbors, with a New England prep school pedigree and a degree in art history from Berkeley (paintings by Paul Klee and Kandinsky grace his ranch house walls). One can’t take the measure of Hunt too quickly, and he does his best to extend the same courtesy to others, though he plainly prefers animal companionship to that of most humans. Within this “live and let live” society, the murder of a homosexual, followed by the arrival of protesters, sparks a series of hate crimes (with racial epithets as calling cards) that law enforcement seems powerless to prevent. Hunt shines as the novel’s beacon of decency, but Everett surrounds him with more characters than the novelist takes space to develop and some plot devices (a metaphor-heavy cave, a three-legged coyote) that scream Symbolism 101. Yet the narrative voice remains thoughtful and consistently engaging, while the momentum of the plot accelerates as complications ensue. A man who strives to adhere to moral absolutes, Hunt embodies a perfection that can aggravate some who are closest to him, who feel that they fall short. Both Hunt and the reader ultimately discover that such perfection comes at a price.
As an astute judge of character, Everett recognizes that wounds are an essential part of the human condition. The possibility of healing gives his novel its redemptive power.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55597-427-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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