No Big Insights here: just perfectly observed details of ordinary life that coalesce to offer a realistically hopeful and...
A smart, ruefully funny debut chronicles actress-turned-playwright Denny Roman’s coming of age.
Okay, so she’s 37 in 2000 and tentatively moving into adulthood just as her first full-length play opens successfully off-Broadway. But Denny had a lot of childhood grievances to get over, starting with her parents’ divorce when she was ten and the fact that her mother Lily, though loving, is so wrapped up in her medical research that she tends to miss things like Denny’s understudy-becomes-star turn as Lola in her suburban Ohio high-school production of Damn Yankees. Luckily, even as early as that event back in 1976, Denny has found a second mother: “Maureen is the one who shows up, whether or not Denny’s parents do, and Maureen is the one who taught her not to listen to the idiotic voices in her head, just the smart ones.” Beginning as the invaluable organizer of Lily’s and Denny’s lives, Maureen later becomes a psychotherapist, has a mixed-race baby out of wedlock at age 45, and dies on Denny when she’s in her 50s. She’s as complicated and appealingly vulnerable as the other members of the extended family that Cline portrays so well: Lily’s nurturing younger second husband Phil; Denny’s often clueless father Charles and his second wife Ellen; and Maureen’s son Luke. Most engaging of all, though, are Lily herself—so anxious to do her best for her daughter that she almost always blows it—and Denny, whose “emotional immediacy,” she realizes early, tends either to confound or overwhelm other people, including ones she loves. The author nicely manages to capture the tangled resentments and aggravations of family life without herself wallowing in them, and she depicts her characters’ feelings with both humor and a sense of empathy in clean, cool prose spiked with just enough colloquial bite.
No Big Insights here: just perfectly observed details of ordinary life that coalesce to offer a realistically hopeful and genuinely touching finale.Pub Date: April 27, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6183-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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