The trick and true pleasure here are in the utterly ordinary context these extraordinary events occur in. Drury never misses...
From the Iowa heartland, Drury (The Black Brook, 1998, etc.) conjures a deceptively simple tale of a family and a weekend, during which the husband steals a gun, the wife runs away, the daughter gains a goat, and also a creepy admirer, the son waits for his mother—and life goes on.
Charles the plumber is a decent guy, maybe a little possessive of his wife, Joan, but on this October weekend he's really starting to come unglued over his late stepfather's shotgun, which the local minister's widow presently owns and won't part with, even though she doesn’t have a history with it, as Charles does. Joan, meanwhile, an exactress now focused on animal rights, flies to the city to give a convention speech to likeminded advocates, glad to escape from the oppressive routine and the latest wrinkle: her daughter, Lyris, now returned to her as a teenager after Joan gave her up as an infant. Lyris, raised in a string of foster homes, draws the weaselly eye of Follard, a young ne'erdowell who once set fire to his parents' house with them still in it. Innocent Micah is just trying to have a normal boyhood. Charles buys his stepdaughter a pet goat, then breaks into the widow's house to claim his gun, thereby getting more than he bargained for. Joan, followed on her trip by the town doctor, starts an affair with him and begins to wonder if she really even wants to go home. Follard takes a tipsy Lyris for a ride and then won't take her home, thus earning a visit from Charles, who trades a knife in the neck for the pleasure of breaking some of the weasel's ribs. Joan calls to say she won’t be back until spring.
The trick and true pleasure here are in the utterly ordinary context these extraordinary events occur in. Drury never misses a beat—the quiet moments dazzle as much the louder ones.Pub Date: May 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-94113-X
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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
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