Olmstead's first novel is a drawn out melodrama of love and underworld murder in rural New England. By the author of the story collection River Dogs (1987). Asel and Averell are the orphaned brothers of backwoods (Maine) parents who fished and trapped for a livelihood. After their accidental death, young Asel is raised by a brutal German farmer named Borst; later (still unable to read or write), he works for older brother Averell deep in the Maine woods, as a scout and guide for big-city "sports" who come, in their decadent manner, to drink and shoot. All goes well until Averell mysteriously disappears, and Asel lives on in their hunting cabin for three years, trapping furs for a decent-minded middleman and wrestling with a Great and Tormenting Secret. The secret—not revealed until the close—is that Asel has murdered two especially depraved "sports" who seemed, on top of it, to have some kind of strangle-hold on Averell. What the reader does learn early on, however, is that three years alone in the wilderness drive Asel to acknowledge his need for Woman. He sets out for New Hampshire, where the middleman has arranged contacts for him, and he ends up living with an erstwhile VISTA volunteer (and now schoolteacher) named Phoebe King, who has troubles of her own (a husband-in-name-only who died in Vietnam; a tyrannical father; an absent mother) that give her, frequently, a tendency to cry. An atmosphere of angst and shapeless foreboding hovers over the lives of Asel and Phoebe ("You know, sometimes I try to figure it all out and I can't"). There will be scenes of farm life; the beery antics of local rustics; a woman who hangs herself in the forest ("We all kill ourselves in the end," philosophizes Asel. "Some of us need help. Some of us don't"); and a scene (impeccably rendered) of Asel butchering an ox as the novel waits sluggishly for its ending to come about: return to the north woods; sudden appearance of central-casting gangsters; shootings and a house on fire; one last murder; and returning Asel's closing embrace with the waiting-at-home Phoebe. Half and half: crisply observed set-pieces robustly written, the whole placed into an ambience of made-for-TV soap.
Pub Date: March 12, 1988
ISBN: 0394757521
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Vintage/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
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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