Godden (Great Grandfather's House, 1993, etc.) is known for sentimental, old-fashioned morality tales, and this absurdity is no exception. Pippa is the youngest and newest member of a British ballet troupe traveling to Venice, where she and the other dancers attract the attention of young Italian men, who speak in charming broken English. Unfortunately, while Godden apparently has a great, blind love for Venice and includes lengthy passages of local color (``the pageant of the piazza, its colonnades, the domes''), she has failed to bone up on some basic facts (i.e., the Italian version of the name Paul is Paolo, not ``Paulo''). From the opening pages, it is perfectly clear where this one is headed, particularly since Godden occasionally pops in a section from the side of Nicolï, a young Venetian gondolier. Pippa's trials—for a young woman must always have trials in this type of book—are musty. Godden tries to wed the primmer and homophobic values of an earlier era with contemporary characters. Pippa struggles to balance her admiration for the ballet mistress Angharad with Angharad's mysterious dislike for her best friend Juliet, whom Angharad calls ``common and...a tart,'' and to combine singing with Nicolï's fledgling band with her dance rehearsals and performances. She also befriends Nicolï's employer, a wealthy, church-going British marchesa living the grand life. When Angharad makes a clumsy pass at her protÇgÇe, Pippa flees to Nicolï, who is sleeping in his gondola, which is about as realistic as a New York cabbie camping out in Central Park for the night. Sex here is bewildering: Angharad is fired because she should not be working around pretty girls; the word lesbian is never uttered. On the heterosexual front, Pippa is offended that Nicolï has taken care of birth control. Nicolï, too, turns out to have his faults, and Pippa leaves Venice—what else?—older and wiser. It would be difficult to find a clichÇ about love, Italy, or art that Godden has missed. As full of garbage as Venice's famed canals.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-13397-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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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