Thoughtful, beautifully written, and wonderfully tender toward its appealing characters: another impressive achievement for...
The author of The Journal of Mrs. Pepys (1999) again offers a vividly wrought fictional memoir by the unsung amanuensis of a real-life figure.
François Burnens goes to work in the summer of 1785 for M. François Huber, a gentleman living outside Geneva. Monsieur, as Burnens refers to him, has been blind since he was 19; he hires François to assist him in his study of bees, as well as such mundane tasks as shaving. Spanning ten years, Burnens’s leisurely first-person narrative reveals its author as an intelligent, observant youth and his employer as a warmhearted, reflective man who has forged the agony of affliction into hard-won serenity. We see through Burnens’s eyes that the Hubers’ profoundly loving marriage has its frustrations for the blind man’s wife; occasional lapses when the manservant forgets himself and refers to Madame as Marie-Aimée reveal an increasingly insistent attraction between them. There’s no melodrama, however, only the delicately described relations of decent people striving for fulfillment within the bounds of duty and honor. The Hubers’ other servants and their son Pierre are as fully imagined as the three principals, and the two men’s work with bees is as fascinating as the household interactions. George subtly uses their scientific efforts to show Monsieur imparting life lessons about patience and meticulousness to the young manservant, promoted to secretary after his careful reflections prove as invaluable as his eyes. “God bless your vision, Burnens,” Monsieur exclaims when they make a crucial discovery about how the queen bee mates. “Mine is only the sight, sir,” he replies, “yours is the vision.” Yet over the years Burnens’s sentiments of affection and obligation are challenged by a growing desire to find work, a wife, and a home of his own. The time comes for him to leave, with Monsieur’s gracious yet sorrowful blessing. It’s a mark of how sensitively George has shaped her tale that this inevitable denouement leaves us both saddened and exultant.
Thoughtful, beautifully written, and wonderfully tender toward its appealing characters: another impressive achievement for George.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-7472-7041-4
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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