A poorly plotted novel that nonetheless offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of analytical psychology.
After nearly losing her daughter and having her heart broken by divorce, a 56-year-old Greenwich Village psychologist gains the strength to welcome life’s pleasures—and pains—in this meandering debut novel.
It’s been roughly six years since Georgina’s world exploded. At the time, her then-teenage daughter Kate was suicidal, requiring constant care. And her philandering husband, Colin, had become inexplicably hostile to Kate, a stepchild he had helped raise. Since their split, Georgina has done her best to heed the advice of her friend Emma, who proclaimed: “You can’t lick your wounds forever if you want to be the heroine of your own life.” But Colin’s betrayal still stings. Granted, Kate has found her way out of the darkness; she’s happily married and expecting her first child. And Georgina’s focus has shifted to the present as she searches for ways to help her sister Julia, who was recently diagnosed with cancer. Yet both mother and daughter continue to confront unresolved issues. Kate is working on a graphic novel based on her experiences with depression. Georgina finds her dreams frequently returning to the subject of her ex-husband. As both women seek new beginnings, can they use their past traumas to build a better future? An unfocused narrative undermines Plunket’s attempt to fictionalize the therapeutic journey of self-discovery. Conversations and ruminations about psychological and spiritual theories are intellectually stimulating, but they do little to drive a thin plot forward. Key events seem to be missing from the book. Georgina spends time preparing to talk about her husband’s affair with a writer from Psychology Today, but that storyline is dropped with no indication of whether the interview ran. Likewise, Kate and her husband think long and hard about whether they should attend his mother’s wedding, but after they decide to go, the novel says nothing about the event itself. The omissions point to a larger flaw. While Plunket writes masterfully about the past, she pays too little attention to the day-to-day lives of her characters.
A poorly plotted novel that nonetheless offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of analytical psychology.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9857152-5-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Deeper Well Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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