Novelist Alexie (The Toughest Indian in the World, p. 400, etc.) ultimately has two things to declare in this book: he is a...
Distinguishing poems from prose in this mixed-genre collection is simple: the poems feature line breaks and copious repetition. To readers who require further elucidation, Alexie offers this inane equation: "Poetry = Anger x Imagination." Even if that were true, much of his anger about the mistreatment of Indians (not, he firmly declares, "Native Americans") in America is diluted (divided?) by sentimentality. The material, often about reservation life, appears to be autobiographical, although Alexie seems to enjoy challenging readers' perceptions of reality—especially white readers. "Why Indian Men Fall in Love with White Women" (a frequently recurring theme, incidentally) is set in a donut shop, although "it wasn't / a donut shop but something else entirely." The desired effect of such a gesture must be irony—Alexie avers elsewhere that "Indians recognize irony when [they] see it." But the author himself must not see it when he sarcastically rebukes a critic for inquiring about the oral tradition ("It doesn't apply at all because I typed this. And when I'm typing, I'm really, really quiet"), since almost none of the poems works effectively on the page. This is the stuff of slams. Still, there is much welcome humor in Alexie, and many of the prose passages about his reservation childhood are imbued with a touching lyricism. One wishes for more poems like the fine, if ponderously titled, "A Poem Written in Replication of My Father's Unfinished Novel Which He Would Read to His Children Whenever He Was Drunk."
Novelist Alexie (The Toughest Indian in the World, p. 400, etc.) ultimately has two things to declare in this book: he is a poet and an Indian. But the evidence supports only the latter claim.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 1-882413-77-6
Page Count: 96
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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