This riveting melodrama is the first full-length novel in English from the young Chinese author of the brilliant novella Raise the Red Lantern (1993). Cinematic vividness and speed are in fact distinguishing features of the powerful story of Five Dragons, an ambitious young man who escapes the misery and famine that devastate his provincial homeland for ``success'' in a teeming city (near Shanghai) itself endangered by widespread poverty, gang warfare, and Japanese military occupation, in the years just before Communism. Taken in by the Feng family proprietors of a thriving rice emporium, Five Dragons is seduced into marriage with its wanton daughter Cloud Weave, then later weds her embittered younger sister Cloud Silk. Prosperity and power ensue, but nothing mollifies this stoical antihero's envy and indignation; nor is there solace in the children he siresa brood of greedy, sexually voracious, murderous mutants whose rapacity reaches a feverish climax as the frail Five Dragons, dying, is overpowered by the worthless son who has coveted even his father's gold teeth. The concatenation of horrors is relentless, and the imageswhich make ingenious connections among hunger, aggressiveness, and sexualityare appallingly graphic and violent. Yet Su Tong's characters, simultaneously grotesque and realistic, are drawn with such intensity that we believe them capable of anything (``The men in our family are born killers,...the women senseless sluts''). Page by page, the novel stuns us with a sequence of hallucinatory, disturbing inventions: the savage beating of a small boy and the hideous revenge he exacts; the murders of several prostitutes, ordered by the enraged, syphilitic Five Dragons, the image of his ravaged, suppurating body rising up defiantly out of the vinegar baths that keep him, against all odds, stubbornly still alive. Rice ensnares, and outstares you; no matter how extreme and operatic its content, you simply cannot not believe it. Balzac and Zola would have recognized a kindred spirit in Su Tong, whose extraordinary pictures of the extremes to which human beings drive one another and themselves seem scarcely inferior to their own.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-13245-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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