Writing for the fun of writing. A treat for the reader.
Two novellas from the big heart of an American original—one about time and music, the other a riff on Moby-Dick.
Still active, curious and writing in his ninth decade, Bradbury (Farewell Summer, 2006, etc.) does a little desk cleaning, finishing up a story that’s nagged at him for years and having another stab at a sci-fi version of Moby-Dick first written for radio following his screenplay for the midcentury John Huston film. The first novella, Somewhere a Band is Playing, was inspired by a Jerry Goldsmith movie theme with which Bradbury was so taken that he went home and wrote lyrics for it, snatches of which turn up here. An early 20th-century Chicago reporter, James Cardiff, responds to a song heard in a dream by taking a train to Arizona, alighting at Summerton, a Brigadoonish town scheduled to be wiped off the map by highway engineers. He’s met by an amiable stationmaster who delivers him in a horse-drawn wagon to a beautiful small hotel full of intoxicating kitchen smells and peopled by amiable immortals. Cardiff’s wanderings through the town follow the route of a friendly delivery horse and lead him to the arms of Nefertiti, another immortal, beautiful and wise, whose invitation to join the club sets his head spinning. Will he accept? It doesn’t really matter. The pleasure here is writing that sounds like Aaron Copland’s music written for Our Town, and it is pleasant indeed. In Leviathan ’99, Ishmael Jones signs on as crew for a rocket set for a mapping and exploration mission. His Queequegish berthmate is Quell, a huge telepathic spider with whom he quickly bonds. Following Melville’s template, the captain has his own mission, to capture Leviathan, the comet that blinded him years ago and which is now on a trajectory that will bring it perilously close to earth. Astronomy being more exact than 19th-century marine navigation, things come quickly to a head.
Writing for the fun of writing. A treat for the reader.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0061131571
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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