Michaelos's first novel is the story—told through letters and diary entries—of Freud's treatment of his first hysteria patient- -here known as Lucy O. The young and just-married Freud (it's 1886) believes that Lucy suffers from childhood seduction by her imperious and unpleasant father; but in the treatment (through hypnosis) that he embarks upon, the ambitious young doctor has an even deeper quarry: he suspects that the repressed forces of prehistoric myth themselves are surfacing to produce the attractive young girl's hysteria. ``The patient is, in fact,'' writes Freud, ``greatly discontented with being a girl,'' and, under hypnosis, Lucy recites long passages of a poem about fleet-footed Atalanta, the mythic girl who, alone among male hunters, took part in the slaying of the Calydonian Boar. As he does his own literary research into the myth of that hunt from pre-antiquity, Freud finds himself (following Lucy's father's death in an apparent hunting accident) so drawn to his patient that he, too, seduces her—with results that will lead him later to Greece and the site of ancient Delphi, where the alluring wife of Heinrich Schliemann, discover of the ruins of ancient Troy, is working on her own archaeological dig and caring for the still-mysterious—and pregnant—Lucy. In Greece, there will be cataclysm (volcano), sex (oral), childbirth (stillborn), and lots of talk (``But we don't have time today to probe the mystery of the emergence of literature from mythology'') before Freud will at last return to Vienna and his patiently waiting wife, Martha. Akin to other recent dawn-of-psychoanalysis entertainments— When Nietzsche Wept, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P.—this one, struggling ambitiously to keep up its level of drama, will interest those armchair Freud-sleuths able to overlook a certain amount of woodenness (asks Mrs. Schliemann when meeting the young doctor, ```Then you subscribe completely to the Helmholtz canon of determinism and materialism?''').
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42405-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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