There's an old John Prine song, ``Spanish Pipe Dream,'' in which the singer meets a stripper who advises him to blow up his TV, move to the country, eat a lot of peaches, and try to find Jesus on his own. Waller (Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend, 1993, etc.) kick-starts his latest with a similar encounter between a stripper and a drifter: Texas Jack Carmine rushes to the rescue of a stripper when some ``nameless piece a' shit tore off Linda Lobo's G-string instead of putting money in it like he was supposed to.'' What follows has a little more sadness, a little more violence, and a lot less irony than the Prine song. Texas Jack is tailor-made not just to suit feminine fancy but to fill the empty pages that men reserve for the images of their alternate selves. ``He'd thought once or twice about joining up with the armies of conformity, then reconsidered and went on being a seldom hombre, dancing to some other song nobody else heard or even dreamed about hearing, living his days in a fashion that made Henry David Thoreau look like a regular citizen. Henry David spent only two years staring into the waters of Walden Pond, Jack Carmine had spent a lifetime doing something like that and never once saw anything resembling a reflection looking back at him.'' Jack's had some tough times. In fact, he was the gunner in the whirly-bird that lifted the last Americans off the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. Jack is GI Joe, Willie Nelson, a lover, a dancer, a crooner. The ballad of Jack and Linda proceeds to where any good American romance must: the road, and backwards into a troubled past. With references to country music and original Waller (not Fats) tunes written by the character of Bobby McGregor, the book yodels its themes of music and rootlessness. What it is, in fact, is a no-holds-barred romance for men. (First printing of 1,000,000; first serial to Playboy; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Feb. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51858-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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