Mates uses her experience as a practicing physician to make sensitive and insightful comment on the nature of healing. Each of the 12 stories in this slim debut evokes a weighty world filled with sadness and hope as men and women coping with failures and losses find the unexpected light at the end of the tunnel. But Mates is candid enough to offer no happy endings. As each character struggles with such harsh realities as political exile, cancer, betrayal, suicide, or lovelessness, release and salvation are attained only through suffering: A concert cellist and teacher fails a brilliant student for political reasons and suffers the guilt of her subsequent suicide for years until he purposefully cuts his finger and can never play again (``Juilliard''); a man loses his college-age son to wanderlust, and as his wife and family crumble, he finds an exciting new freedom (``Brickyard Pond''). Often, Mates incorporates her knowledge of medicine, offering a close-up of illness, trauma, and death, as well as a refreshing look at the healing potential of caregiving. For example, a young physician, contrary to all medical convention, advises an old man destined to die of cancer to forgo the painful, and probably pointless, therapy and learns that while she may not be a good doctor, she is a good person (``Laundry''). And in the powerful title story, the head of a hospital's medicine department allows herself to be seduced by a young, careless student who wants to blackmail her into passing him and experiences a reprieve from spinsterhood and the strict rules she had always forced herself to live by. Unfortunately, this collection of honest, profound tales is marred by the inclusion of a couple of stream-of-consciousness pieces that turn strong tales of teenage conflict (``My German Problem'') and a contagious disease specialist's battle with AIDS (``These Days'') into virtually meaningless drivel. Still, Mates possesses an extraordinary bedside manner.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87745-467-1
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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