A luminescent and evocative tale of grief, free of the standard clichés.
A young woman’s sudden identity crisis propels her to the isolated reaches of Lapland in Vida’s powerful second novel.
Clarissa, a New Yorker in her late 20s, is hit by a pair of emotional shocks within the space of a week: Her father has died of a heart attack, and while rummaging through his possessions, she discovers that he was not her biological father. There’s nobody close to comfort her in the midst of this crisis. She’s deeply wounded that her fiancé, Pankaj, knew and never told her, and her mother has been missing and presumed dead for years. There is nothing for Clarissa to do except fly to Helsinki, get to Lapland—a 21-hour trek by bus and train—and find Eero, the man her birth certificate says is her father. Lapland’s austerity and distance from New York is a small comfort, but Clarissa’s interactions with the locals reveal that her personal history is even more complicated than she had thought. That learning process unlocks a host of bad memories—being raped as a teenager, looking for her mother in Texas and later holding a funeral for her. This kind of material often gets shaped into a fish-out-of-water tale that closes with comforting reconciliations. But Vida (And Now You Can Go, 2003) is having none of that: This is a sharp, sometimes brutal, portrait of a woman who feels her persona has been wiped away and wants to start over, not heal. Her careful, unadorned prose neatly reveals Clarissa’s mix of damage and resolve, echoing Raymond Carver’s minimalism while retaining the warmth that so many Carver imitators lack. And Vida’s evocative descriptions of life in Lapland—the reindeer herds, the slow pace of the locals, a hotel made of snow and ice—underscore the themes of isolation and otherworldliness but never overwhelm the core story of Clarissa’s despair.
A luminescent and evocative tale of grief, free of the standard clichés.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-082837-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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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