Poverty, AIDS, and alienation hobble the lives of the lesbian and gay protagonists of this Lower East Side novelan unusually insightful if sometimes self-indulgent tale of love lost, briefly gained, and lost again. Rita Weems works at New York City's Pest Control officea strange job considering the central role rats play in her worst nightmares. Her fear goes back to her life as a teenage runaway when, banished from her father's home after an affair with a female classmate, she spent her nights on Manhattan's West Street pier and watched swarms of the rodents frolic a few feet from her face. Now in her mid-30s, Rita still struggles to come to terms with her Jewish father's rejection and her mother's death when Rita was only ten. Her two closest friends are hardly better off: David, whose upper-middle-class family labors valiantly to pretend he's straight, is dying of AIDS; Killer barely survives by watering plants for $40 a week and renting her bed out to European tourists rather than ask her disapproving immigrant parents for a place to lay her head. As the three friends pass a New York summer roaming the streets for entertainment, they obsessively analyze their parents' lives in hopes of explaining away the pain of familial rejection. Still, they realize as David's death arrives and, as he had feared, passes almost unremarked among the death-weary gay population, understanding the reasons for abandonment fails to bring a sense of peace. Seeking solace in a new lover's arms, telling herself that her travails will make life easier for future lesbian and gay generations, Rita knows that nothing can erase ``that terrible night. When she came so close to getting what she needed, what every child deserves. Someone to be on her side. Someone to defend her.'' A bit overdramatic, perhapsbut Schulman (Empathy, 1992, etc.) artfully conveys her characters' particular sense of loss. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93790-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
PERSPECTIVES
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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