Tremain's latest starts slowly but gathers emotional speed and literary power: an entrancing, highly satisfying read.
English author Tremain (Restoration, 1990, etc.) returns triumphantly to the 20th century, sketching the outwardly stunted postwar lives of a dozen small-town characters in rural Suffolk- -people whose inner lives, however, are surprising, colorful, sometimes tragic, and drive many of them to a bittersweet, affecting end.
At age six in 1952, Mary Ward—observing a minute of silence for the dead King George IV while standing in a potato field belonging to her brutish father, Sonny, and her dreamy mother, Estelle—suddenly becomes aware that she wishes she were a boy; over the next 30 years, fighting with her hapless brother Timmy, strapping her growing breasts against her chest, falling in love with a neighbor girl named Pearl, running away to her grandfather Cord's house in the wonderful town of Gresham Tears, changing her name to Martin, moving to London, submitting to psychoanalysis, and finally having a sex-change operation and emigrating to Nashville, heroic Mary makes this pressing wish come true. Estelle, lost in a vague dream of her own that eventually leads her to a mental hospital, and Sonny, who becomes a sloppy, suicidal drunk, don't fare as well. But Timmy—who wants to be a pastor rather than a farmer—does; he marries Mary's girlhood love-object Pearl. Eventually, the local homosexual dentist Gilbert, who longs for a swinging life; Walter, Gilbert's first lover, a butcher's son who wants to become a Nashville country music star; and Walker's mother Grace, who buys Sonny Ward's farm after Sonny has killed himself and who grows rich raising chickens—all these and others will get what they secretly need. So, finally, ironically, does even the dead tyrant Sonny—who gets a son to work the land, even though the son is Mary and the land she's working is in Tennessee.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-689-12170-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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