Half a Heart is anything but half-hearted. We feel we can trust Brown's integrity and compassion; that's why her fiction,...
The volatile relationship between a fortysomething Houston matron and the racially mixed daughter who hesitantly reenters her life is central to Brown's intelligent, affecting, if occasionally slow-moving fifth novel (and first since Before and After, 1992).
Miriam Starobin's embattled tenure as an idealistic teacher of history in Mississippi in the late 1960s climaxed when she gave birth to Veronica, fathered by Miriam's black colleague Eljay Reece, a militant music scholar who then contrived to keep the baby and drive Miriam away. Seventeen years later, when Miriam's comfortable marriage (to prosperous ophthalmologist Barry Vener) and motherhood (of their three children) begin to chafe against her half-guilty memories of Mississippi, `Ronnee`—now college-bound, and brimful of barely contained anger toward both the unsupportive Eljay and the unknown mother who `abandoned` her—arrives for a tense reunion, first at the Veners' New Hampshire summer property, then back in Houston, where Miriam's hopes that she can make her `other daughter` belong are cruelly tested. Brown handles this potentially preachy material better that almost anyone else writing today. Her style is a carefully judged blending of almost reportorial flatness with vividly rendered (restrained and overflowing) emotion, graced by frequent flashes of perceptive metaphor (Ronnee experiences everyday racism `like a chronic low-grade illness that sometimes flared up`; the charismatic Eljay basks in the `admiration of everyone . . . especially the women . . . [which] circled him like a string of little flashing lights`). Brown's scrupulous analyses of both her protagonists' believably crowded and confused emotions is impressively alert to the subtlest gradations of feeling, thought, and principle, and she makes us believe that all her people are tightly focused, exhausted decent people doing their fallible best to comprehend one another's `worlds.`
Half a Heart is anything but half-hearted. We feel we can trust Brown's integrity and compassion; that's why her fiction, even when (as here) it's intermittently redundant and overexplicit, never fails to grip us.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-29987-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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