None
The promise Nunez revealed in her acclaimed 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God, is here fulfilled and magnified, as she follows the struggles of a woman to know her father and understand herself, labors that imperil her once secure marriage. Nona, little loved as a child and a pill-dependent insomniac as an adult, has found a measure of happiness hitherto unknown in her five-year marriage to Roy, with whom she shares a love of music and New York City life. Trouble erupts, however, during a monthlong visit to a friend's country estate, to which she retreats to work on a book about her father—an artist long dead, but out of her life even before that—when she meets brooding, handsome English prof Lyle and inexplicably finds herself opening up to him. He swamps her with love letters when they return to their respective homes, until she decides to visit him for a weekend in Tucson. His passion proves to have been written with disappearing ink, but back in New York, Nona finds that her marriage has slipped its moorings in her absence: She and Roy separate with rapidly dwindling hopes of reconciliation. In despair, she picks up the book project again, contacting her father's last lover, a man, who warms to her and reveals a side of daddy she never knew. She draws some comfort from her emerging knowledge of her father. Yoga and meditation, along with a dog, also provide comfort, enabling her to cope with a near- miss from breast cancer, and when Ray proposes a honeymoon they never had, she finds herself ready, tentatively, to begin again—a decision sorely tested when yet another unexpected disaster disrupts their lives. No dazzling, high-powered dynamics here, but, rather, a steady, superbly insightful study of a life as quietly complex as the reader's own: a tale that touches the heart of what it is to be human. ($30,000 ad/promo; author tour)
None NonePub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017276-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
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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