One of the enduring Christian mysteries is the existence of stigmatics (``people who bear in their bodies the injuries of Christ's crucifixion''). Hansen's third novel (astonishingly different from his Western historicals, Desperadoes, 1979, and The Assassination of Jesse James, 1987) is about a young stigmatic in an upstate New York priory in 1906. Mariette Baptiste is a 17-year-old postulant seeking to join the Sisters of the Crucifixion, a 200-year-old order with its motherhouse in Louvain, Belgium. The narrative covers the six months of Mariette's stay at the priory. She arrives in August, already ``the gossip of the summer'' because of her beauty and background. She is the daughter of the wealthy local doctor and the sister of the prioress, Mother Celine, 20 years her senior. The doctor, miserable at losing a second daughter in this way, feels Mariette is too ``high-strung'' for the convent; but for Father Marriott, the old priest who hears the sisters' confessions and becomes Mariette's most ardent champion, she is not neurotic but chaste. Hansen sets Mariette's preternatural experiences against the rhythms of priory life and the all-encompassing rhythms of the natural world. He is particularly good at dramatizing the central tension of priory life: the nuns' need for mutual affection, ruled impermissible because it distracts from their ``grandest passion,'' Jesus Christ. Mariette first feels Christ's wounds on Christmas Eve, as her sister is dying of cancer. Soon hundreds of lay people are coming to the priory, hoping to glimpse the stigmatic. The new prioress, initially skeptical, becomes convinced that Mariette's wounds are miraculous after the doctor has examined them; nonetheless, alarmed by the disruption of priory life, she sends Mariette home. Since the reader never doubts the authenticity of Mariette's experience, the only suspense element is the priory's response to it. But what Hansen has achieved, through his immaculate narration and (in the Joycean sense) his invisibility, is a notable act of witness.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-018214-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
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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