Six of the eight stories in this debut collection have appeared previously in magazines ranging from Harper's to Mississippi Review, and one (``Charlotte'') has been reprinted in two ``best of'' anthologies. All of Earley's work is considerable, despite the tell-tale MFA polish and neatness. Though very much southern in setting and subject, Earley's tales often sound as flat and affectless as the New South sensibility he records. The much-reprinted ``Charlotte'' is an unabashed bit of nostalgia for a lost time in that North Carolina city, before pro basketball came to town, when garish pro wrestling instead held sway. The young male narrator of ``The Prophet From Jupiter'' suffers a similar loss when his wife leaves him for a smooth-talking cop with no appreciation for the area's rich history. Nostalgia and loss come together in ``Gettysburg,'' in which a former UNC jock, traveling through the unforgiving North, realizes the awful mistake he made when he encouraged his wife to have a tubal ligation early in their 18-year marriage. Childlessness figures in the title story as well, a post-operative mastectomy patient's reflection on her long, lustless marriage to a decent lug—proving that a good man is all too easy to find. In ``Lord Randall,'' a 34-year-old janitor remains flabbergasted by his still sexually active parents and their addiction to goofy get- rich schemes. The last three stories, with some repetition, tell about the narrator's strange life in small town North Carolina, where he was raised by his widowed mother and her bachelor brothers. Two of the pieces celebrate the simple wonders and mystery of ordinary things. Full of folksy platitudes about ``our stories,'' and how they go on, and the world being ``crazy with all kinds of luck,'' Earley's debut nevertheless reflects some genuine insight into ordinary people.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-19962-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
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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