Amidon’s strength, a gritty realism, is sacrificed to a never-believable morality tale about the power of money to corrupt.
In Amidon’s sixth novel (Human Capital, 2004, etc.), various story lines converge to yield a small-town melodrama.
Stoneleigh is a picturesque college town in western Massachusetts, but its inhabitants are beset with problems. Strong, decent Edward Inman, owner of a security company, is stuck in a loveless marriage to ambitious Meg, a selectman running for mayor, but he yearns for Kathryn, his old sweetheart. The equally decent Kathryn, abandoned by her flaky husband, is struggling to raise her two sons; 19-year-old Conor has become a sullen stranger. In worse shape is Walt Steckl, widower and electrician, hooked on pills and booze after a work-related accident. Though innocent, he’s had two run-ins with the law, adding tension to his relationship with daughter Mary, a college student who attends the same nonfiction workshop as Angela, who’s had a torrid summer-long affair with their cool professor Stuart (divorced). Amidon’s poorly structured novel is top-heavy with exposition. Where’s it all heading? Oddly enough, to one of the town’s richest men, Doyle Cutler, a colorless creep who’s made a fortune in the debt-consolidation business. Why does the unemployed Conor have a bottle of expensive French wine in his room? The answer is Cutler. Why is Stuart suddenly avoiding Angela? Again, the answer is Cutler. Everything comes to a head when Walt, in a drunken stupor, finds his traumatized daughter curled up on his kitchen floor. She had been at Cutler’s house, along with Conor and Stuart, and left with a damaged shoulder. Was there an attempted rape? Amidon undercuts the suspense by lingering on the pain of his other victims, hapless Walt and deluded Angela, while ignoring Cutler, the prime mover. The other story line—the resumption of Edward and Kathryn’s love affair—is sidelined after a considerable build-up. The violent ending is really no ending since Cutler, astonishingly, is out of the picture.
Amidon’s strength, a gritty realism, is sacrificed to a never-believable morality tale about the power of money to corrupt.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-25711-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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