Culture-critic Gitlin takes another stab at fiction (The Murder of Albert Einstein, 1992), surpassing his earlier effort with the story of a long-strained father-son relationship, fathomed only after the father’s suicide. Seventy-six-year-old Chester Garland, a respected psychiatrist, set the process of understanding in motion one August day, when he abruptly dropped in front of a subway train at Grand Central Station. His son Paul, respected for his work as a pornographic cartoonist (in the spirit of R. Crumb), is duly summoned to the office of Chester’s lawyer and handed his father’s journals, which date from the time years ago when Chester went to Paris to give a paper at a psychoanalytic congress, then failed to come home as promised. As Paul turns the pages, he learns of a man frustrated in his career and his personal life, a man who impulsively decided to make a quick trip to Chartres to see the cathedral—but got on the wrong train. A woman he meets on the train, a Czech refugee with a small boy of her own, implicitly offers him an intangible something that he can’t explain (but knows he needs), and they quickly begin an idyllic affair in her town on the coast of Brittany. The liaison lasts for months, dissolving his marriage, ruining his relationship with Paul, and earning the disapproval of his friends. Only a catastrophe can bring Chester back to a semblance of his former life. It’s the long shadow of that event that finally leads him to his lonely perch on the subway platform. Paul’s part in this fractured tale is often heavy-going, but Chester’s journals and the world they evoke provide a fine portrait of a tortured soul who, wholly by accident and only for a moment, found paradise.
Pub Date: April 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-6032-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
IN THE NEWS
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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