Enjoyable, terrifying, addictive: the kind of anthology readers deserve.
White lightning in printed form.
The roster of writers who have read/performed their works at the KGB Bar in Greenwich Village over the years is an embarrassment of riches, no doubt. But an anthology of this sort can be a dangerous endeavor, sometimes resulting in first-name authors submitting third-rate material, the editors hoping that readers will be drawn in anyway by the marquee stars and KGB’s retro-Commie cachet. All such fears are put to rest when one cracks open the first of the 20 stories here, “He’s Back,” by Victoria Redel. An oblique cascade of scenes about a mother and child who spend an inordinate amount of time bathing, it turns sharply and darkly toward a husband’s violent dissatisfaction with family and life. Philip Gourevitch follows up with “Mortality Check,” which takes a simple pick-pocketing incident and morphs it into a Raymond Carver–esque tale of failed marriage. The stories here indeed often delight in beginning with the ordinary and taking them beyond the pale, though never in an expected fashion. Francine Prose’s “The Witch” injects a creepy hint of the supernatural into what should have been a routine piece about a chronically squabbling couple, while Judy Budnitz’s “Hook, Line & Sinker” kills the standard-issue my-parents-are-trying-to-set-me-up-with-a-doctor bit of dating-insecurity fluff that it could have been with this line: “I save used condoms, labeled and dated and sealed in Zip-Loc baggies in the freezer. I figured I might need them one day when I was old and lonely and ugly.” There are numerous other treats: Jonathan Lethem’s amusing and off-kilter “Planet Big Zero,” Thom Jones’s short, slashing tale of a young girl’s obsession with a homicidal maniac, “Thorazine Johnny Felsun Loves Me,” and Elizabeth Tippens’s ode to suburban ennui, “Make A Wish.”
Enjoyable, terrifying, addictive: the kind of anthology readers deserve.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-30152-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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