A beckoning slice of life.
A migratory mother flirts with stability in first-timer Donner’s strongly realized novel of place.
Elaine is the widow behind the wheel, forever tucking daughters Hannah and Daisy into her rattletrap Datsun, their drowsy eyes opening on 11 seedy homes in just three years. Now, in the summer of 1983, the girls find themselves in LA, outside the harshly misnamed Sunset Terrace, a complex of six low-rent apartments colonized by single mothers—true “characters” all—and vivified by the children they’ve raised on cheese wieners and cherry soda. Nomads no more—so they hope—the family dares to put down its roots. Their obstacles are many. Elaine, a college-educated short-order cook, struggles to find work (one job has her squeezing whipped cream into endless pastry swans) and to make peace with the ghost of her husband, a cellist whose slow slide into dementia ended in suicide. The brooding Hannah, meanwhile, favors her pet turtle over her mother and little sister. But all changes with the introduction of Bridget, a sassy, scabby nine-year-old who, when she’s not shoplifting, chants lewd ditties from her perch atop a chain-link fence. Hannah and her mother quickly attach themselves to the waif, for different reasons, and a warm if precarious harmony ensues. Donner, who so well limns her novel’s sass, falls short in development of suspense: the jealousy that results in Bridget’s gruesome end is too faintly evidenced. This needn’t, however, deter readers from the author’s true gift, which emerges out of a deep sense of place; her Sunset Terrace approaches the snug communality of another shabby setting, that of the houseboat dwellers in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, adhering to the memory with a shrieking of gulls and a dappling of sun on cinderblock. We see through the smoke of Virginia Slims many heartfelt characters, hear through the buzz of their gossip many familiar longings.
A beckoning slice of life.Pub Date: May 21, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-34-6
Page Count: 324
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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