Imperfect, then, but powerful and thoughtful.
From the talented and ambitious Askew (The Mercy Seat, 1997), a second novel set in her native state of Oklahoma, this time a tale of primal guilt and racial intolerance during the oil boom.
In 1920 Tulsa, Althea Dedham is known as the spoiled wife of Franklin, an oil speculator who may finally have found his big strike down by the Deep Fork River. This is also the site of Althea’s impoverished childhood and of the ghastly birth, in 1900, of her brother Japheth, whose unwelcome arrival at the Dedham home sets in motion a chain of events that will reach apocalyptic fruition in the Tulsa race riot of 1921. Japheth, we quickly learn, is Trouble: he rapes Althea’s black maid, Graceful; he incites Franklin and partner Jim Dee Logan against each other; and he lies in wait for the part–Native American, part-black woman who actually owns the land Delo Petroleum is drilling so he can force her to sign her rights over to him. Iola Tiger also happens to be the midwife who saved newborn Japheth from death at the hands of his sister Althea. That’s a lot of coincidence for one novel to bear, but Askew isn’t interested in plausibility; our responsibility to and for other human beings is her principal theme here. She’s brave enough to make her protagonist initially unlikable: Althea bullies Graceful to assuage her own sense of worthlessness and heedlessly wanders into Tulsa’s black district, too immersed in her personal wretchedness and blinkered in her privileges to understand why three African-American men are terrified to have a weeping white woman in their offices. Althea’s moral growth into Graceful’s ally is intellectually satisfying, if not particularly moving; in general, the characters are strongly observed and truthfully drawn, but viewed from a distance. The mythic elements, like Iola’s first-person narrative and Japheth’s transformation from Bad News into Evil Incarnate, are also rendered somewhat unconvincing by this lack of emotional connection. Still, the gruesome finale makes a blistering indictment of white racism without ever uttering a didactic word, and there are haunting images throughout.
Imperfect, then, but powerful and thoughtful.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-88843-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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