The Nobel laureate's first full-length novel in more than a decade (since More Die of Heartbreak, 1987) is a pungent intellectual drama that's short on plot but contains some of the sharpest, most provocative writing of his long and honorable career. The narrator, identified only as "Chick," is an elderly writer who relates—in a vigorous mixture of narrative, speculation, and reminiscence that sparkles with zesty combative dialogue—the story of his friendship with (the somewhat younger) Abe Ravelstein, a charismatic professor of political science who has become an international celebrity mage ("He interpreted Rousseau to the French, Machiavelli to the Italians, et cetera"), and authored an inexplicably bestselling "summa" of his ideas. Ravelstein, homosexual and dying of AIDS, has urged Chick to write a memoir of him. Their lives are intertwined in various ways (Chick's young second wife Rosamund, for example, was Ravelstein’s prize student). But Chick is conflicted, knowing how much they also differ: he’s a receiver of sensory impressions, an ontological observer for whom the physical world is a gift we spend our lives unwrapping; Ravelstein is an unregenerate theorist who insists men live guided by "rational principles" (despite overpowering evidence of his sensual appetite). Only after Ravelstein's death, when Chick himself nearly dies from a perversely "accidental" neurological illness, does the acolyte (for such he surely is) come closer to understanding the extent to which his hectoring "teacher" has also been his scourge, Platonic "other half" (seeking union), and conscience. Bellow tangles these lives and worldviews together brilliantly, in an essentially static drama that vibrates with paradoxical wit and submerged (though almost physically intense) feeling. It's mostly talk—but what talk! This is a novel that grabs you by the neck and forces you to think, and rewards you with a dazzling insight or superbly turned phrase or sentence on virtually every page. The work of a master, who has lost none of his unique ability to entertain, enthrall, and enlighten.
Pub Date: April 24, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-84134-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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BOOK REVIEW
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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BOOK REVIEW
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