Merullo’s third novel nicely combines the strengths of his first two: it’s as beautifully written as his first, Leaving Losapas (1991), and as smoothly plotted (and commercial) as his second, A Russian Requiem (1993). Although it’s about family, gambling, gangsters, sin, and redemption, Merullo’s smart book resists all the clichÇs of ethnic melodrama. Set in the blue-collar coastal town of Revere, Massachusetts, this study in secrets and lies in no way romanticizes either its working-class Italians or the goodfellas who prey upon their addictions. For Peter Imbesalacqua, a 40-year-old failing real-estate agent, that vice is gambling, which threatens to engulf his entire world, including his parents, Vito and Lucy, still living in the neighborhood, and his glamorous sister, Joannie, a Boston TV news anchor who’s bailed Peter out of too many jams. Told in the various voices of the main characters, the narrative also relies on the perspective of Father Dom, Vito’s boyhood friend and confessor to the Imbesalacqua family, and someone with a few secrets of his own. Peter’s debt to local wiseguy Eddie Crevine forces him to debase himself and lie to those around him. A dreamer with a true salesman’s personality, Peter is further haunted by a long-held family secret: the true relation of a childhood buddy, now the local police captain, who will do anything to protect the Imbesalacquas. Joannie, whose own secret everyone has long suspected, decides to practice tough love with her brother and also plans to expose Crevine in a series on local crime bosses. Merullo, with a tip of his hat to Dostoyevsky, probes the psyche of the gambler but avoids any neat explanations for —the animal of addiction.— The conflict of loyalties here(church, blood, class) also accounts for much inner turmoil among the primary characters, each drawn with sensitivity and intelligence. If Coppola or Scorsese ever repent for their glamorization of the underworld, this is the perfect novel to bring to the big screen: the ordinary people of Merullo’s realist fiction, no easy saints themselves, testify to the true meaning of familial love.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-6005-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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