Throughout this Australian writer's harsh-to-playfully satiric novels (Hunting the Wild Pineapple, 1991, etc.), the massive idiocy of institutionalized greed—an individual's or a country's—is dismembered sinew-by-socket. Here, in two novellas, two solitary ones observe Evil on the march, and both have moments of smashing revenge. Both ex-academic Mac Hope, divorced and over the middle-age hill (in ``The Genteel Poverty Bus Company''), and Julie Truscott (in ``Investing the Weather''), married to the awful Clifford, find their evil encapsulated in one nasty, crude, and cruel personage, the scourge of civilized values and of the purity of the natural world—the Developer. In this case, Clifford. It is Clifford who is ``turning into a plastic Disneyworld'' pristine islands like the one opposite Mac's hermitage where Mac courts solitude and peace. When Mac blasts music (Wagner or Bartok are good choices) across the water at three in the morning—sometimes to slap back at the Club Med-type of disco beat—the battle is on. Mac will lose his own island, of course, while he still muses on the nature of solitude and his earlier search with lonely others in his bus-tour days—and in spite of help from another lonely isolate, a kind of young scholar gypsy who leaves before Mac heads for ``the void.'' Meanwhile, Clifford's wife, Julie, hands philandering Clifford a blow when she simply leaves the house and three kids to him and takes on a journalist's job. But rankling cruelties and loss of the kids bring her to despair—and eventually to a small mission run by three saintly nuns in a pure and quiet semiwilderness. Then comes Clifford, resort plans in his pocket. Clifford's end is quite horrible—and satisfying. A bit like the wickedly fun and satiric Fay Weldon. Sometimes cerebrally overengaged in style, but always fresh and inventive.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-399-13770-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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