In a beautifully rendered but slight debut novel about the getting of wisdom, an Indian snake charmer struggles to find meaning after he impetuously destroys what he loves most. While Sonalal, the snake charmer, is a fully realized creation, his story may have been better suited for a novella, for it doesn—t, good as it is, quite fill out the more ample contours of a novel. Author Nigam, though, does lyrically evoke the place, Delhi, and the mood—arising from the consuming need to atone and understand—as he tells this story of the most talented snake charmer and musician in all of India. Middle-aged Sonalal is one of the many street artists and beggars who gather at Hamayun’s Tomb in Delhi to entertain or fleece the tourists. One day, to revive a tired Raju, his snake, who had been performing all day, Sonalal plays music that, had it been recorded, might have guaranteed him immortality. Raju responds, but when Sonalal goes on to play a note wrong, the snake stops dancing, and the humiliated musician picks him up and bites him in two. The act makes Sonalal a celebrity and temporarily wealthy, but he’s heartbroken and horrified by what he’s done to his beloved Raju. His wife is a shrew, his children despise him, and only Raju, he believes, understood him. Grieving, despairing of his life, he becomes impotent; he also fears that Raju’s mate is pursuing him. As he searches for answers, Sonalal consults doctors, magicians, and fellow charmers. Then his impotence is cured by Reena, a prostitute whom he loves, and he acquires another snake—even though he never attains with him that moment of godlike perfection he’d shared with Raju. A narrowly averted disaster helps him finally understand that the perfection he had briefly known (—the ether that smelled like a freshly cut mango—) still exists but is hard to attain. A small gem of a story that entertains, moves—and, naturally, charms.
Pub Date: June 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15809-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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