Throughout the novel’s extremes of violence and tragedy, Anam always allows the ultimate humanity of the characters to shine...
In the free-standing second installment of her planned trilogy about Bangladesh, Anam (A Golden Age, 2008) transfers her focus from a mother who sacrificed so much before and during the war for national independence to her children, grown and at odds in the revolution’s painful aftermath.
The narration shifts between the mid-1980s, when disillusioned Bangladeshis find themselves under the rule of a corrupt dictatorship, and the ’70s, when the war has just ended. In the ’70s, Maya, studying medicine, is first stupefied, then enraged by the changes in her brother Sohail. Her protector as a child, then a socialist intellectual and heroic soldier, Sohail gradually withdraws into narrow religious faith. The philosophically opposed siblings goad each other until Maya leaves. In 1984, after seven years away, Maya returns to her mother’s home from the rural community where she’s been practicing medicine. Sohail, now a religious leader with a growing following, has become even more entrenched and inflexible. Although his wife has recently died, he is too busy tending to his devotees to pay attention to his small son Zaid. Neither in the ’70s nor ’80s does Maya know or understand what Sohail experienced as a soldier that has made the safety of rigid belief so attractive. But when her mother becomes seriously ill, Maya herself finds solace, however short-lived, in praying with the cloistered women devoted to Sohail. At the same time, she is drawn to political activism and to Sohail’s seemingly cynical old friend Joy, who has spent time in the United States. And she is intermittently concerned about Zaid, a troubled child starving for affection. Then Sohail, genuinely concerned in his own misguided fashion, decides to send Zaid away to a fundamentalist madrassa. Even after the crisis that ensues, Sohail remains more than a scary fundamentalist while Maya finds a way to recover from her own mistakes.
Throughout the novel’s extremes of violence and tragedy, Anam always allows the ultimate humanity of the characters to shine through.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-147876-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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