Bland prose and long stretches of trivial, repetitive dialogue: a banal and tepid fifth from Lewis (Second Draft of My Life,...
Middle-aged musician starts over.
Tending bar and living on royalties from long-ago hits, Tom Good doesn’t think much about his glory days in rock ’n’ roll—until a blast from the past on a store’s piped-in soundtrack knocks him for a loop. He sure wishes he could go to the drugstore and supermarket without hearing memory-triggers for everything he’s tried to forget. Gee, whatever happened to Diana, his true love? Her conditioner smelled excellent. Took him forever to throw the bottle out after she left him. According to his buddy Kevin, Diane is the single mother of a fifth-grader—a boy who looks just like Tom (and who’s known as “Good”). Heck, you mean Diana had his kid and never told him? Is that why she went away without a word of explanation? Should he start acting like a father or what? But his son Jack doesn’t want anything to do with his long-lost dad, and the kid isn’t even musical. And Diana would rather sigh a lot than explain much, anyway. So Good goes back to being nice to the old lady upstairs and to the neighbor’s kids, back to just living his life and stuff. But, hey, Diana is thinking of getting married. Is this new guy going to be Jack’s dad and cut Good out of the picture or what? How not-fair is that? Well, okay, so what can he do? Be a knight in shining armor for the old lady and hook up with the just-dumped mother of the next-door gang, that’s what. They start making quilts and whatnot. It’s a metaphor or something. Gee.
Bland prose and long stretches of trivial, repetitive dialogue: a banal and tepid fifth from Lewis (Second Draft of My Life, 2002, etc.).Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-3671-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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