A lively satiric return to early '90s Manila, seen from both sides of the Filipino American divide.
It's 1991. A gay Filipino American returns from his home in Hawaii to his native Manila, where he is jousted by absurd encounters, thwarted desires, cultural and political upheavals and painful memories.
Vince, introduced in Linmark's Rolling the R's (1997), hasn't been in the Philippines since 1978, when he and his siblings left for Honolulu—six years after their parents flew off to escape the Marcos regime. Sensory overload greets him. The heat is stifling, he's accosted by strangers attractive and not, a mysterious sleeping sickness is claiming men and a volcano is about to erupt. Having arrived with members of the Filipino balikbayan culture, who cart unwieldy boxes stuffed with food cans, shampoo bottles and designer jeans, he acclimates to a different social setting when his good looks draw the attention of showbiz types. A film and pop-culture obsessive, he becomes part of a world including President Corazon Aquino's movie-star daughter, known as the "Massacre Queen of Philippine Cinema." The title of the book, which translates not as milk, as in Spanish, but as a four-letter word, is as cheeky a novel as you'll encounter. Broken up by postcard correspondence, dream sequences, glossary entries and "Tourist Tips" ("Staring is a favorite Filipino pastime. Don't take it personally"), it's nothing if not breezy. Linmark isn't funny or cutting enough as a prose stylist, though, or innovative enough as a postmodernist to achieve the tour de force he's after. As lacerating as he tries to be, his satire is rarely more than mild, and his attempts at magic realism fall short. But the book's nonstop energy and nonstop attitude are addictive. And in Vince you won't find a less predictable tour guide.
A lively satiric return to early '90s Manila, seen from both sides of the Filipino American divide.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56689-254-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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