In the darkest hour of the American withdrawal from Vietnam, a slow-horse newspaperman fights to rescue the niece whose existence he's just discovered—in this swift-moving tale from Navajo chronicler Hillerman (Sacred Clowns, 1993, etc.). The scene is familiar: the abrupt American departure in April 1975, followed within days by the fall of the Republic of Vietnam, the brutal ethnic cleansing in Cambodia by Poi Pot's Khmer Rouge, and the chaos that turns inoffensive villagers into refugees, fleeing the countryside with the Americans and the ARVN. But the hero swimming against this tide is new to the scene, and so is his author, whose bestselling novels about Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Det. Jim Chee hardly prepare for his most unheroic hero yet: portly, balding Malcolm "Moon" Mathias, whose life as managing editor of a third-rate Colorado daily is suddenly put on hold when his mother collapses en route to Manila and a search through her papers reveals that Moon's kid brother, Ricky, a hotshot civilian flier, left an infant daughter when he and his Vietnamese wife were killed in a helicopter crash. As Moon and the motley companions who cluster around him—Lum Lee, the elderly friend and "business associate" of Ricky's in search of a missing consignment from the helicopter; Osa van Winjgaarden, who's trying to rescue her brother from the martyrdom he's been thirsting for; George Rice, the pilot who didn't fly Ricky's daughter, Lila Vinh, out as planned; and Nguyen Nung, the ARVN deserter with "Kill Cong" tattooed on his chest—descend into the heart of the Mekong darkness, Hillerman exults in the swift geographical trajectory open to him outside the Navaho reservation. At the same time, it's clear why the novel isn't called Finding Lila Vinh: Moon's journey is also very much one into the past, and into the nonentity he's chosen all these years to be. A familiar tale, movingly told by a surprising voice.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017772-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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