Occasional flashes of humor (the honeymoon is a good comic sketch), but overall dreary and joyless: those sexcapades aside,...
Still best known for Slaves of New York (1986), Janowitz, in her ninth fiction, details the sexual odyssey of a self-described slut.
Peyton was raised in Boston on the wrong side of the tracks, where sexual innocence was a sign of weakness. Her well-bred mother, Nell, was disowned after marrying a car mechanic, who later deserted them. Manic-depressive Nell is responsible for Peyton’s low self-esteem, always telling her she has no brains; so, despite her stunning attractiveness, she has no idea how to market herself. It’s sheer good luck that she meets Barry Amberg, a nice Jewish boy from Long Island just starting out as a dentist, with a thing for “dark-haired shiksas with big boobs.” His mother, Grace, pegs Peyton as a tramp but still foots the bill for a huge fancy wedding. The Jamaican honeymoon is not a success, though Barry is crazy about his “sexy princess” and Peyton is glad to have married up, though she’s bothered that Barry “didn’t seem to exist.” He exists for the reader, but only as the stereotype of a hypochondriac Jew, while Peyton is little more than a collection of body parts. This nonlinear narrative randomly splices scenes from Peyton’s married life (the two produce one child) with various extramarital sexual escapades. Her first splurge happens in Rio, early in the marriage, with Germano, a cosmopolitan and filthy-rich older man. (Peyton is a travel agent now.) Years later, closing in on 50, Peyton has the hots for this Chinese guy in Hong Kong, a thief preying on rich airline passengers; but again, the sex is wild, which makes it all okay. After he dumps her, Peyton hits rock bottom. We leave her in Antwerp, lice in her hair, nowhere to turn.
Occasional flashes of humor (the honeymoon is a good comic sketch), but overall dreary and joyless: those sexcapades aside, the novel is permeated by a disgust for the body that extends to Peyton suckling her baby.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31844-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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