The latest by the author of the witty The Thought Gang (1995), etc., is a disappointment of mind-numbing proportions. It reaches so far for comic effect that it stumbles badly and ends by seeming little more than a bland tale of frustration and confusion in matters of the heart. The gimmick is simple: Fischer tells his contemporary story in the voice of a pot—a ceramic bowl from Mesopotamia that's over 6,000 years old. The idea is that the object of collectors through the centuries now gets to turn the tables and comment on its owners, which makes this a sort of postmodern comedic comment on Bruce Chatwin's high modernist novel Utz. And that's the best one can say about the resulting strained narrative romp. The frame story concerns a young art appraiser named Rosa, a ``scrutinizer'' and diviner who can spot fakes in an instant and who can sense the complex histories of each object she fondles. This particular piece of ``pottery worth a lottery'' comes into her possession to be appraised for a ``lugal'' (the pot's term for wealthy collectors) of maniacal disposition. Meanwhile, a nympho-kleptomaniac connives her way into Rosa's life, performing acts of thievery (and sex) that are increasingly outrageous. But Rosa's mind is elsewhere: She falls under the sway of a columnist to the lovelorn whose advice lost Rosa her last boyfriend. Interspersed throughout this main story are the many tales imparted by the pot, itself a cracked narrator of bizarre fables involving its previous owners: the man who couldn't kill his wife; the spurned lover who couldn't succeed at suicide; the village called ``Arsehole''; the ship that sailed for Cathay but never left Venice; and Odile, the collector of insane poets. There's also a running joke about frozen iguanas. For all of its manic inventiveness—the wordplay, the rhymes, the new vocabulary—Fischer's goofy novel is a victim of its own cleverness. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-5118-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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