An intelligent tear-jerker.
Eros and Thanatos in Boston.
Merullo (In Revere, In Those Days, 2002, etc.) risks the mawkish in this readable tale. Having just spent a celibate year mourning the death of his girlfriend Giselle, Jake Entwhistle emerges for a donut, only to meet and fall for Janet Rossi, a woman dying of cystic fibrosis. Jake is the new man incarnate—both carpenter and artist, given to goofy jokes and the occasional fistfight in defense of maidens in distress. Giselle, it turns out, died on 9/11, aboard Flight 93, when it crashed in Pennsylvania. Janet, who was having an affair with her boss, Charles Valvelsais, the shady but recently reelected governor of Massachusetts, may not survive the year it will take for her to find a lung transplant donor. The lovers do snatch some moments of happiness together, but Merullo spends more time charting Janet’s illness than he does the happiness. A visit to Jake’s brother, a Catholic monk, brings up the subject of belief. Jake speculates on an indifferent God, “a mean-hearted trickster” who permits the suffering endured by the diseased, the terrorized and their families. Some spleen is also directed at the medical establishment in the guise of various reptilian doctors whose treatment of Janet verges on the callous or self-interested. It falls to Jake to discover that she might be saved by a living lobar transplant. But his labors are far from over. He must twist the arm of the one local (retired, reluctant) surgeon who could perform the operation and then find two suitable tissue donors. Jake himself will be one and, at Janet’s urging, Valvelsais—who turns the challenge into a p.r. opportunity—the other. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by Janet’s endurance. But it would take the hide of a rhino not to feel massaged into emotional compliance by the story’s heavily stacked odds of circumstance and character.
An intelligent tear-jerker.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4867-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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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