Predictable fare, but first-novelist Gertler offers a tender evocation of lost love, and what it means to find it again.
A mother of four daydreams about the boy she loved when she was 16—and sets out to find him.
Emily Hudson’s life seems perfect: husband Peter is a successful attorney and their four children are unnaturally well-behaved. She even finds time to paint now and then in her attic studio. But the passion went out of her marriage years ago, and workaholic Peter barely seems to know she’s alive. It's not surprising, then, that her thoughts turn to her first love, Jimmy Moran, and the blissful summer of 1967 that the two spent in New York. When his unfeeling, alcoholic, rich father pulled Jimmy out of private school and forced him to join the Marines, Emily was upset, naturally, but helpless to intervene. Then she ran into Jimmy outside her apartment building after his stint in boot camp: he was no longer the tender boy she was sweet on but, rather, a rough young soldier. So Emily, a budding peace activist, makes up a story about losing her virginity to someone else, and the two part company, hurt and confused. In Vietnam, Jimmy is profoundly traumatized by the slaughter and hypocrisy he sees. He returns and drifts through a series of dead-end jobs while Emily, knowing nothing of this, marries Peter and moves to Connecticut. As years pass, she toys with the idea of finding Jimmy—and, in due time, he and she reunite, in Washington, D.C., at the Vietnam Memorial. They’re inexorably drawn to each other, of course, for a weekend of explanations, lovemaking, and nostalgia. Will Jim return to his long-suffering wife and adopted daughter? Will Emily shock her husband out of his withdrawn complacency? Will these two troubled souls find happiness and get on with their lives?
Predictable fare, but first-novelist Gertler offers a tender evocation of lost love, and what it means to find it again.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94565-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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