The British author who in such accomplished books as The Five Gates of Hell (1991) and Soft! (1998) has perfected the kind of noir thriller Graham Greene used to write now outdoes himself with this absorbing tale of captivity and obsession. Thomson’s protagonist is a nameless Englishman who has found fame and fulfillment in Amsterdam as a dancer and choreographer, and who is the lover of his beautiful partner Brigitte. Leaving their apartment one evening on an errand, he is met by “three figures in hoods and cloaks”—women admirers, it seems. But the three drug and kidnap him, chaining him to the floor of an almost empty room (whose only furnishings, oddly enough, are a washer and dryer) where he is kept naked, sexually used, subjected to genital mutilation, forced to perform a ballet of his own choosing before an audience of unidentified spectators, then released after 18 days. Though Thomson never explains his experience, symbolic reasons suggest themselves when the dancer begins “to feel as if his fate was no more or less than he deserved,” and it is suggested that his (usually masked) captors— domination of him dramatizes “the damage that had once been done to them now finding expression in clandestine rituals, barbarity, a pursuit of the bizarre.” The nature of his subsequent “freedom” is equally cryptic. The end of his relationship with Brigitte (to whom he cannot tell his story), an unexpected legacy that enables him to travel widely, his surrender to compulsive promiscuity, and a rash act that can only be interpreted as attempted rape—all are ironically logical outgrowths of his desire to find the women who altered his life and to understand the person he has become (or has perhaps, without realizing so, always been). The psychodrama Thomson builds from these fascinating particulars is an ineffably disturbing “revelation” of the possibilities and dangers we unknowingly carry within ourselves. One of the most eerily original novels of recent years. Thomson’s masterpiece.
Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40927-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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