Lacking coherent plot development and a single compelling protagonist, Hegi’s latest reads disconcertingly like snippets...
The German-born author breaks new ethnic ground to little effect in her tale of a child’s death haunting two generations of Italian-Americans in the Bronx.
Hegi (Stones From the River, 1994; The Vision of Emma Blau, 2000, etc.) chronicles a half-century (1953–2002) through the eyes of four members of the Amedeo family: Floria, her sister-in-law Leonora, and their children, Anthony and Belinda. Floria’s brother Victor, who inherited their mother’s love of cooking, starts a catering business and marries Leonora; Anthony is their only child. Floria weds Malcolm, a roofer from England who steals from his employees and periodically goes “Elsewhere” (jail), which means his wife and her twin girls, Bianca and Belinda, must move in with her brother. Tragedy ensues when seven-year-old Anthony encourages cousin Bianca, in her Superman cape, to believe she can fly to her father. She falls to her death, and this central event shapes every subsequent development. Floria takes to her bed and abandons her sewing business. Guilt-ridden Anthony retreats into silence. Leonora wonders whether her son has inherited a violent streak from her father, a guard at Sing Sing who frequently beat Leonora and later committed suicide. Though the loss of Bianca still resonates 50 years later, Hegi provides a slew of other dramas. Victor has an affair and tries to get an annulment before changing his mind and begging Leonora to take him back, which she does: “Because of the habits. Because of Anthony . . . . Because time will not be theirs forever.” Floria ditches Malcolm for his best man, the guy she should have married all along. Belinda finds happiness in her second marriage to a former priest, while Anthony, now a chef, fathers a son in an on-again/off-again marriage punctuated by six separations and five reunions. All these exits and entrances count for little beside Bianca’s death, which sits like an indigestible lump in the gut of the narrative.
Lacking coherent plot development and a single compelling protagonist, Hegi’s latest reads disconcertingly like snippets from a multigenerational saga.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-5598-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
