A sublime murder ballad that doesn’t turn out at all the way one might expect.
A woman with her own agenda is caught between two men obsessed with the past.
After breaking through with a disquieting memoir about his Southern childhood, Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It, 2007) applies his storytelling talents to a debut novel, set in 1907, about icy duplicity and heated vengeance. The autumn of Ralph Truitt’s life finds the 54-year-old businessman waiting on a train platform in rural Wisconsin for Catherine Land, the plain woman who answered his advertisement, which read: “Country businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical, not romantic reasons.” But the beauty who arrives is not the woman whose photograph Truitt obsessed over, and she’s conspiring against him. “What she wanted, of course, was a quick marriage to Ralph Truitt, followed by his painless demise,” Goolrick writes. “What she wanted was both love and money, and she was not to have either except through Ralph, except, in fact, after Ralph.” Carefully, the author unveils the secrets between husband and wife. Truitt confesses his losses, which include his daughter, who died, his first wife, who had an affair, and his runaway son, who fled the violence suffered under his father’s hand. The enigmatic Catherine does her best to hide her bleak history as a courtesan, undertaken to protect her sister, Alice, whom she still seeks. Surprisingly, there’s more to Truitt than the bottomless lust and rage that threatens to consume him, as the faithless Catherine discovers when he dispatches her to St. Louis to find his long-lost son, who is playing piano under the name Tony Moretti, a name she knows all too well. Back in Wisconsin, the three parties converge and are pushed toward an unpredictable yet inevitable endgame.
A sublime murder ballad that doesn’t turn out at all the way one might expect.Pub Date: March 31, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56512-596-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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