Gothic Sturm and Drang by British scholar Holland, whose first novel tells how a 19-year-old Lord Byron becomes emperor of the planet's vampires. In today's London, Rebecca Carville, her auburn hair spilling and aglow, searches for Byron's lost papers: and, entering the tomb of her relative Lord Ruthven, is gripped by weird forces that lead her to Byron himself, still alive. Byron tells her the story of his induction as Lord of the Dead in Albania, where he slew the previous Lord, Vakehl Pasha, and unwittingly took on the mantle of top bloodsucker. Byron, in the tale he tells, falls for Vakehl's slave HaidÇe, who dies, or so Byron thinks as he mourns her throughout his return to England. As his own physical beauty coarsens amid riotous bloodlettings, Byron finds that the only way to get on the wagon again is to drink the ``golden'' blood of his own child or of a family member such as his half-sister Augusta, a horror he resists despite his incest with her and his convulsive appetite. Back on the Continent, he tries to draw Shelley into his empire, but Shelley would rather drown . . . . As a genre work, this is better than many. Holland's Byron is a manic-depressive whose bouts of despair—often on horseback and draped with rain and storm—are indistinguishable from the mercurial moods of the usual 19th-century Romantic hero. Style and storytelling both hit their stride as Byron sinks more deeply into his vampirism and as happy inventions arise from his subconscious: When visiting the fields of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, the poet finds himself viewing ragged ghost battalions at war as he walks through soggy earth still pumping with blood. Attractive figures in living pasteboard, yes, but a sequel seems likely, as long as Byron still lives and longs to escape eternity. (First printing of 75,000; Book-of-the-Month Club alternate; Quality Paperback Book Club featured alternate; $100,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-671-53425-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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