A literary beach read that will keep you thinking after the vacation’s over.
A chain of islands in the middle of the Pacific provides the backdrop for Tanner’s (From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story, 2012, etc.) comic exploration of expatriate life and its consequences.
In the 1950s, the U.S. used the Marshall Islands as a test site for nuclear bombs. Fifty years later, the Americans in Tanner’s breezy tale are more self-destructive than anything, though their imprint on the island nation is hardly a net positive. For better or worse, they stick mostly to American-dominated Kwajalein, which “looks like a 1950s cinderblock beach town gone to seed” and houses the U.S. personnel who study missile defense at the nearby Ronald Reagan Test Site. Among the employees there is Cooper, who sails all the way from California for his new job but manages to lose a leg in the process. Alison, the art teacher at the Kwajalein high school, isn’t much better off: she’s coping with her husband’s recent drowning, mostly by drinking her way through lunch. Then there’s Art, a bedraggled former Peace Corps volunteer who married a native and now serves as “Cultural Liaison” to the expat community, explaining Marshallese customs while lobbing rhetorical grenades at American culture from afar. Meanwhile, the only Marshallese protagonist, Jeton, pines for his American girlfriend, Nora, who's preparing to return to the U.S. for college. Marshallese are banned from Kwajalein after nightfall, and Jeton’s attempt to see Nora before she goes proves a crucial turning point in the plot. The themes here are major—global warming, imperialism, America’s role in the world (the story is set soon after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal). But Tanner displays a light touch, favoring snappy dialogue over didacticism. The result is winning, though for some the novel may feel just a touch too lighthearted: at various points characters confront everything from alcoholism to catastrophic weather to sharks, but one gets the sense early on that, for the four major players, all will (mostly) work out in the end.
A literary beach read that will keep you thinking after the vacation’s over.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63246-009-7
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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