Minor insights far outweighed by a parody of childhood so perfect it’s annoying.
Documentary filmmaker Sedlack debuts with a somewhat backward young man’s insipid account of a journey toward adulthood with his folks in tow.
Richard Clark’s parents take him on a tour of Africa when he’s 19, a trip his mother always wanted. But the Dark Continent promptly sends her into madness—Richard hardly cares, since he hates her (he thinks she might have once molested him)—and the alcohol isn’t really helping dad to cope at all. Meanwhile, Richard distracts himself with sex with a German frau (while her husband watches), a crocodile man in a cave who warns him that he stinks of death and lies and should leave Africa, and a 20-year-old named Nicole, who doesn’t mind that Richard has a strategically repaired harelip. Richard’s journal entries occasionally segue back into fantasies he had about housewives at 15, ranging on to old football games that might have made a difference in his life had he scored a touchdown, and to a belt beating once administered by dad—but eventually the relationship with mom is the one that becomes an issue again in Africa. Is it because things have gone sour with Nicole? “It’s not your lip that makes girls run. It’s your mind. They can tell. You’re not right,” says she. Author Sedlack overplays the journal style, and Richard’s adolescence, too: what we read is often little more than a dry diary by an oversexed and unambitious stylist. But as weird as mom and dad are, and as bizarre as the excursion to Africa will become, even Richard will eventually arrive at something of significance and realize that “Mom and dad have shown me that true freedom is found not in the lotus position, and certainly not in the revelation of dark, buried secrets, but in the jaws of a lion.”
Minor insights far outweighed by a parody of childhood so perfect it’s annoying.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-300-5
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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