Three beautifully crafted novella-length stories from Price, whose three very different central characters are all urgently concerned with one of the greatest questions of all-how ``to face the rest of a life,'' with all the uncertainties and hardships that that implies. In ``Fare to the Moon,'' Kayes Paschal, close to middle age, his marriage unraveling, and deeply in love with Leah, the niece of his grandmother's black cook, willingly goes off to fight in WW II when drafted. For the first time in his life he had found in Leah, who loves him for himself, a ``kind, intelligent person who fit against his mind and body, and chose to fit, in every way a sane human being would pray to find this side of death.'' In the next piece-which moves like a great epic quest, from epiphany to near tragedy and final triumphant resolution-returned soldier Whit Wade comes back finally from the ``dead,'' prepared to live ``For the Foreseeable Future.'' Badly wounded in the war, and haunted by the faces of those who died, Wade finds that this week of business travel through familiar haunts in North Carolina-in which he takes comfort from strangers and friends-provides the healing that enables him to return home to his wife an daughter, to ``go where they can use you.'' And in the final and shortest story, ``Back Before Day,'' football coach and loving father and husband Dean Walker, who yearns for perfect goodness and security, fearing that his wife might leave him for Clyde, an old lover, flees in the night with his young son. But this journey is also suffused with meaning and symbolism: Dean witnesses an accident involving a former pupil, learns that Clyde is terminally ill, and returns home, tired, but more able to accept the fragility of life ``that would be as strange as this dream, or any, though harder to bear.'' Sometimes Price is too intent on making his philosophical points, and the characters accordingly recede, but thoughtful and elegant writing like this is all too rare. Vintage Price.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-689-12110-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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