Corrupted Creole civility complicates the life of a Brooklyn bohemian—in a spirited debut deftly mingling past, present, and the vastly different worldviews of New Orleans and New York. Ned Conti is a 32-year-old graduate student down and out in New York, passing time in East Village bars, avoiding work on his dissertation, and still mending from a disastrous love affair broken off ten years before. Adding insult to injury is a ghost in his dingy Brooklyn apartment: Furniture moves, stones fall from the ceiling, and he catches glimpses of a former time and inhabitant. A fruitless job researching a locally venerated 19th-century nun for his parish priest, who presides over her mummified remains and hopes to give Brooklyn its first saint, does little to improve Ned's state of mind. And when a Gypsy friend conducts a sÇance in order to get to the bottom of his ghost problem, but something goes awry and she jumps into the East River, he finds he's touching bottom himself. Then he's mugged and pistol-whipped. Meanwhile, his ex-amour, raven-haired New Orleans belle Antoinette, phones out of the blue to invite him to her family's bayou gathering, and in a speed-freaking, fast-lane frenzy the two pick up where they left off—for a few days. Back in Brooklyn, drained and thoroughly bewildered, Ned finally discovers the truth about the nun, his ghost, and Antoinette—though it'll takes hallucinations, an unauthorized visit to the mummy's crypt, and a near-death experience to provide missing links. Forsaking the city of dreams and despair once and for all, Ned lives happily ever after with Antoinette in the city where he truly belongs. The romance in Girardi's first novel has an undeniable sappiness, but entrancing scenes and characters, exquisite timing, and a mausoleum full of plot twists make for a fluid and truly memorable delight.
Pub Date: July 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-31482-5
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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