Eddie’s an awfully passive protagonist, but Coughlin tells his story with just the right amount of insouciance, bitter...
Delightfully grungy second novel from Coughlin (The Hero of New York, 1986), a down ’n’ dirty bildungsroman set on Long Island’s grim, hapless, dead-end South Shore, littered with the 1970s detritus of lava lamps, eight-track tape decks, and long nights cruising in muscle cars.
The only child of a dysfunctional family (Dad’s a womanizing pornographer, Mom an alcoholic employee in a laundry), Eddie slices chickens at the local supermarket, working toward the day when he’ll have job security and higher-than-minimum-wage pay as a full-fledged member of the meat-cutters union. At the sour end of a fateful night double-dating with his buddy Loopy, who ferries packages of marijuana and money to New Jersey, Eddie wakes up to find that one of the girls has charged Loopy with rape and named Eddie as an accessory. Of course, our hero is too much of a repressed, guilt-racked 20-something to be guilty, but that doesn’t stop the same local cops who once busted Eddie for stealing coins from parking meters from barging into the meat department and pulling him out in handcuffs. Eddie’s father bails him out, then reveals that Sandra (the girl who cried rape) was turning tricks as a teenager and had posed for a triple-X photo series. Told he can kiss his meat-cutting job goodbye, Eddie retreats to the shelter of a boat his grandfather gave him. Along with is Elena, his date on the night in question, with whom he’s almost falling in love. There’s more trouble on the way, as father and son get into a nasty fight at the local pizzeria and Loopy contemplates marriage to Sandra. But no matter how hopeless, gloomy, or grimy Eddie’s life gets, he learns he can take the bad hand dealt him as long as Elena is by his side.
Eddie’s an awfully passive protagonist, but Coughlin tells his story with just the right amount of insouciance, bitter ironies, and adolescent angst.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-221-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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