There is nothing tentative in this collection—these are fully formed talents.
This latest collection of stories from US and Canadian writing programs is vibrant and diverse, well up to the high standard set by its predecessors.
Novelist Miller (Lost in the Forest, 2005, etc.) has assembled 15 stories, all roughly contemporary, except “The Temperate Family,” by Caimeen Garrett, a remarkable account of an anguished father’s search for his kidnapped son in 1876. As before, the immigrant experience is well-represented: Russians in Pittsburgh (Ellen Litman’s “About Kamyshinskiy”), Indians in Houston (Keya Mitra’s “Pompeii Recreated”) and a Pakistani in limbo (Fatima Rashid’s “Syra”). The standout in this group is “A Correct Life,” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story about Liem, an 18-year-old Vietnamese who flees Saigon in 1975 and is taken in by a gay couple in San Francisco—culture shock has seldom been so perceptively rendered. American families experience shocks of their own. Blue-collar father and college-dropout son circle each other grimly after the old man’s divorce (“Karaoke Night,” by Dan Pope); sparks fly when alcoholic, four-times-married Frederick the Third shows up for his grandfather’s funeral and finds forgiveness in short supply (“The Freddies,” by M.O. Walsh). Another grandfather, dying in Puerto Rico, gets no respect from his son or grandson, who are off partying elsewhere in the Caribbean; for sheer exuberance, nothing beats this freewheeling story by Kevin A. González (“Wake”). Equally good, in a quieter way, is Anne de Marcken’s “Ashes”; here, a widow ponders the gap between image and reality as she scatters her husband’s ashes. Sometimes characters are dwarfed by a theme (exurban development obliterating American folklore, in Lydia Peelle’s “Shadow on a Weary Land”); sometimes a character sketch serves for a story, whether it’s a control freak masquerading as a good neighbor (Alice J. Marshall’s “By Any Other Name”) or a black postgraduate struggling with a drug habit (T. Geronimo Johnson’s “Winter Never Quits”); yet there is fine observation even in these lesser offerings.
There is nothing tentative in this collection—these are fully formed talents.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-603155-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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