If Lipsett's previous books, Out of Danger (1987) and Coming Back Up (1985), were soft-focus looks at personal tragedy, this time she has taken care to use a more powerful lens—and the snapshots she hands us are not exactly pretty pictures. The book opens with the story of Nancy Jacobs, a young mother who's taken herself to a clinic in Mexico in 1950 to see if anything can be done about her cancer, which the doctors have pronounced to be fatal. Left at home, in California, are her considerably older husband, Maury, and their four young children. In the brief glimpse we get of her, Nancy seems to be life- affirming, passionate, and mostly well-intentioned. Surprisingly, then, the ghost she leaves behind is anything but beneficent. As we follow the next chapters in her family's life, it turns out that Nancy's legacy to them is generally unremitting—and sometimes unendurable—pain. Lernie Jacobs, the oldest daughter, grows up to be plump, artistic, and withdrawn. At age 16, already hooked on Librium for her nerves and Dexedrine for her weight problem, she suffers a blow from unrequited love and swallows a couple of her father's sleeping pills. The result is another tragedy to add to the family toll. Jeff Jacobs, the youngest child, was just learning to talk when his mother died. At age ten, after Lernie's death, he stops speaking altogether. For Maury, Nancy's ghost is restless and ever-present, isolating him and preventing him from forming new bonds-even with Iris, the practical widow who loves him and sees him as the salvation for her own deep, secret loneliness. There are moments of sharp-edged humor here and many moments of epiphany. But what Lipsett spotlights are moments of such pure suffering that, overall, her beam feels merciless—it reveals more than we ever wanted to know.
Pub Date: May 8, 1991
ISBN: 0-916515-98-2
Page Count: 143
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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