A masterful work—its emotional range and the poetry of its language evoke Virginia Woolf, and its attention to detail will...
Unconventionally structured debut novel about a conventional, but moving, life.
May Nilsson has had seven abiding loves in her long life, and each forms the subject of a chapter in this finely drawn and emotionally rich novel. The seven sections include the usual suspects—husband, son, lover and mother—but also throw in some surprising characters—a coworker from a temporary job May takes after retirement, her nursing-home aide and the police officer indirectly responsible for her son’s death. The chapters are not presented in chronological order; readers meet May after her retirement, and meet her lover before her husband, and her husband only after he has retired and suffered a heart attack. Although May’s mother dies very early in her life, the section devoted to May’s youth is the last, most important section of the novel. Rather than depicting the arc of one woman’s experiences as they shape and refine her personality, the book’s structure argues that each moment in an individual’s life represents an entire world in itself. People, for Trueblood, are powerfully present, perhaps never more so than when they try to come to terms with the past. Each of May’s seven loves elicits a different version of May, foregrounds different passions, intensifies different characteristics and desires. No matter that each chapter covers only a few weeks in her life, and that for the most part, Trueblood only gestures at the everyday routines that hold May’s character together; the whole trajectory of May’s life emerges in its fullness by the end. This is a rare assured and capable debut, filled with breathtaking turns of phrase and pulsing with the rhythm of experience, despair and love.
A masterful work—its emotional range and the poetry of its language evoke Virginia Woolf, and its attention to detail will remind readers of Anita Brookner’s work.Pub Date: June 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-05893-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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