Not quite equal, therefore, to Robert Stone or Ward Just, but very much worth reading.
American intervention in the Middle East is the explosive subject of this ambitious second novel from the former war correspondent turned nonfiction writer and author of the memorable 1998 debut novel, Triage.
Anderson is at his best when writing about the world’s most embattled and dangerous places, and he has here invented a disturbingly vivid one: the fictional Arab kingdom of Kutar, a former British colony, in the early 1980s, when an “Alliance” of foreign nations conspires to turn it toward western-inflected democracy. We experience the country’s tribulations through the eyes of Anderson’s protagonist David Richards, a 30-something American diplomat based in the capital city of Laradan, where he oversees various make-work projects and carries on an active adulterous love life. Tensions mount when rebel tribes outside Laradan wage a series of small wars, arousing the interest of U.S. military Colonel Allen Munn, a stiffnecked control freak who advises, and receives consent for, engagement with the rebels by Kutar’s army, “aided” by Alliance forces. The rebels prevail (seizing and stockpiling arms)—and, since Kutar is not oil-rich and is therefore of limited strategic importance, the Allies depart, abandoning Laradan to a (blisteringly depicted) prolonged siege. Richards, who despite his personal weaknesses, truly does act as his adopted country’s “protector,” has a moral choice to make—and it isn’t the one that might have been expected of him. This novel is a mixed success: an astringent portrayal of “a place where talk of peace was reckless and going to war was prudent,” weakened by thinly developed generic characters (e.g., feckless ambassadorial personnel, an idealistic British diplomat, Richards’s impossibly exotic and jaded Kutaran lover Amira), yet vividly energized by its mordant dramatizations of intermingled American idealism and ruthlessness.
Not quite equal, therefore, to Robert Stone or Ward Just, but very much worth reading.Pub Date: May 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51556-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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