The overfed conclusion to an African-American soap opera.
Johnson ties up the loose threads of his fast-paced, thuggish trilogy.
In The Million Dollar Divorce (2004) and The Million Dollar Deception (2008), Nate Kenny manipulated, interfered, bought off and blackmailed his way into the life he wanted; when wife Monica couldn’t bear him a child, he hired Lewis Waters to seduce her so he could save his fortune in a no-contest divorce. But everything has repercussions, and this final installment opens with the appearance of Freddy Ford, Lewis’ best friend, who has lost everything he loves thanks to Nate. Freddy shows up at Nate’s house, shoots him four times, shoots Monica in the head (the two were reconciling) and kidnaps their adopted son Nathaniel. He leaves Chicago for Atlanta, killing a cop on the way, to hide out with old girlfriend Joni while he figures out what to do with the toddler in the back seat and the law on his trail. Against all odds Nate survives, and Monica lies in a coma with good chances for a full recovery. The story is complicated by Daphanie, Nate’s girlfriend before he reconciled with Monica. Daphanie, pregnant by Trevor, tells Nate that the baby is really his in an attempt to woo him back while Monica is still out of commission. Lewis is trying to regain custody of his daughter Layla, who lives at Monica and Nate’s house, though he is not sure he is her biological father. Deceptions, more killing, a budding romance between Lewis and a social worker—it’s a lot of plot in one book. There are some strange, sad moments, as when Freddy and Joni reassure themselves they’d make great parents, and no one survives intact in this kind of modern pulp noir, driven by a nihilism that sees deception as the world’s lingua franca.
The overfed conclusion to an African-American soap opera.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9626-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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