A slender tale of surviving without men that haphazardly stitches together the fabric of some women’s lives.
From Dallas (The Persian Pickle Club, 1995, etc.), a transparently homespun tale of pioneering women facing tough challenges when their men go off to fight for the Union.
The story, which awkwardly mixes period settings with contemporary politics, is told in the form of letters from Alice Bullock to married sister Lizzie in Illinois. Alice, a recent bride now living on a small farm in Iowa, begins the correspondence as husband Charlie is about to go to fight Johnny Reb. She is also a quilter who delights in piecing fabric together and making squares: each chapter is framed with a commentary on quilting, which adds to the folksiness, but, since quilts by now have become feminist icons, they also add a discordant contemporary note. Alice, who has just fallen pregnant, is left to help taciturn and critical Mother Bullock run the farm. Alice soon miscarries but is somewhat cheered by getting together with neighboring women to make quilts for the soldiers. Life gets tougher, though, as the war continues: Charlie is taken prisoner, money is tight, and Alice is pursued by a malevolent Southern sympathizer, Samuel Smead, who tries to rape her. But Mother Bullock warms up to Alice and defends her when she’s accused of murdering the unpleasant Smead, whose decaying body is found near their farmhouse. Alice also describes her relations with the local women (whose friendships are not always dependable); Mother Bullock’s terminal breast cancer; and the difficulty of farming without a man’s help. Her advice to Lizzie, though, who has problems with her husband, and her observations on sex and birth control, often sound more like the stuff of the 21st century, as opposed to the 19th. The war eventually ends, as do the letters, and Alice, weary but proud, is ready for a new future and new quilting experiences.
A slender tale of surviving without men that haphazardly stitches together the fabric of some women’s lives.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20359-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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