A lush, vibrant portrayal of the creative process, a daughter’s love, and the unstoppable maelstrom of grief.
A young painter on the verge of success is waylaid by the sudden death of her complicated father in this debut novel.
Veronica Gonzalez is ready to be finished struggling through her painting career. But after a brief business trip to New York City—a place she left long ago, unable to cope with its excesses—she finds herself on the cusp of a big break and a shift in her luck: she’s being offered solo exhibition space at Art Basel, a major festival for contemporary work. Upon returning to Miami, where she lives with her tepid boyfriend, her father is found near death in his apartment. After he dies in the hospital, Veronica is paralyzed by her loss, terrifying her art dealer and threatening her prospects, but then she begins to pour her emotions into her work, pulling physical and emotional reminders of her father’s life, mistakes, and legacy into a massive art piece. Once this project begins, the novel’s chapters are titled with paint colors—Payne’s gray, hunter green, orange—and the subsequent memory or scenes revolve around that theme, sometimes literally, sometimes more loosely. This formal conceit is a risky move, in that it only emerges partway through the novel, but it succeeds, giving the reader a hauntingly fragmented portrait of a woman trying to pay homage to and be honest with herself about her father’s great love and cruelty and the nuance of her heritage. Veronica’s story is a relentless engine, told in rich, smart prose and lucid detail—equal parts elegy and portrait of an artist.
A lush, vibrant portrayal of the creative process, a daughter’s love, and the unstoppable maelstrom of grief.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9913555-4-9
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Shade Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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