If Captives hit the big screen, it would be an Andy Warhol movie without the sex. Borrring!
A veteran screenwriter wrestles with his culture’s and his own demons in this first novel from the Florida author (stories: The Task of This Translator, 2005).
Fortysomething Daniel Bloom, channeling anger at the Hollywood insiders who altered and retitled his best-ever original script, Captives, as the box office hit Helsinki Honeymoon, conceives a writerly revenge, in a story idea in which “someone…go[es] around taking out elected officials and corporate executives.” When Daniel acknowledges his wish that this fiction become reality, his annoyingly hip agent Holden challenges Bloom to simulate the experience of violence he has only imagined. Pretending he’s shopping for a firearm, Daniel embarrasses himself at a gun dealer’s shooting range. Growing apart from both his embittered wife and their understandably distracted 13-year-old son, he next seeks advice from, and crosses swords with, his synagogue’s fast-talking new rabbi Ethan Brenner (who sounds a lot like stand-up comic David Brenner). The novel trudges along, blending lengthy conversations with tedious self-analysis, and the book begins to feel like a short-story idea expanded to interminable length. Then Daniel—a contemporary Leopold Bloom (?) embarking on an odyssey of self-discovery—impulsively travels to Tel Aviv, bonds with Israelis, who reveal themselves as freedom fighters and film geeks, and experiences shock waves pounding away at his theories about violence as an instrument of justice. Returning home, he finds discord, betrayal and—paradoxically—a rueful wisdom tinted with streaks of grace. The novel improves in its later pages, but it’s too long, excessively redundant and inexplicably dependent on Daniel’s labored talks with the whiz-kid rabbi, the imperturbable Holden (who adopts one movie-related moniker after another, while pursuing Hollywood nubiles) and Bloom’s world-weary Israeli contact Nadav.
If Captives hit the big screen, it would be an Andy Warhol movie without the sex. Borrring!Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101435-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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