Vintage Miller (While I Was Gone, 1998, etc.): a quiet, subtle story of longing, loss, and the compensations that,...
A middle-aged woman tries to make a fresh start when her marriage ends and in the process discovers long-hidden family secrets that eerily echo her own experience.
When Catherine Hubbard’s second marriage founders and her Aunt Rue leaves her the family home in Vermont, she decides to take a sabbatical from teaching and head back East. Her three children, Jeff, Fiona, and married, pregnant Karen, are all grown up, and, drawn by happy recollections of living with her grandparents, she returns to claim her legacy. The house, she finds, has been tastefully redecorated by the former tenant, retired academic widower Samuel Eliasson, who still lives in the village. As she settles in, she finds her grandmother’s diaries in a trunk in the attic, begins reading them, and soon has the sense that her life is recapitulating her grandmother’s. Georgia Rice, the eldest of three, had taken charge when her mother died early. At 19 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the family doctor John Holbrooke sent her to a nearby sanitarium to rest. Cut off from the outside world by infection and looming death, Georgia had fallen in love with fellow-patient Seward. Their affair would affect the marriage Georgia made after she was cured to the much older John Holbrooke. Catherine also recalls her own mother’s suicide, the happy years she spent living with her grandparents, and the two husbands who left her for other women. Tempted to live in a world that seems as self-contained as the sanitarium, Catherine starts dating Samuel Eliasson. But real life, with its mixture of compromise and unexpected satisfactions, intrudes, and Catherine, like Georgia, must return to a more intractable home when her daughter goes into early labor.
Vintage Miller (While I Was Gone, 1998, etc.): a quiet, subtle story of longing, loss, and the compensations that, surprisingly, satisfy and endure.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41094-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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