The question all these stories pose—“Don’t you find that most people prefer blindness?”—is answered by the hunger of Pye’s...
In these nine stories, novelist Pye (Dreams of the Red Phoenix, 2015, etc.) writes about characters who are blind to their own feelings, to the feelings of others, or to the world at large.
The particularly strong opener, “Best Man,” seems slightly sordid at first—a straight man attending the Reno wedding of his dying gay friend to an attractive woman thinks he’s becoming embroiled in a romantic triangle—only to evolve into a deeply moving meditation on the complexity and potential generosity of love. All of Pye’s characters are oblivious or ambivalent about the joys and costs of becoming aware. In “New Year’s Day,” a young teacher willing herself to ignore the world’s miseries clings to simplistic optimism until a semicloseted gay friend exposes her to upsetting yet exciting realities. Similarly, the librarian in “Her Mother’s Garden” feels both anger and relief when the sale of her dead parents’ home forces her to face a future beyond the narrow world she’s clung to. In “White Dog,” the inability or unwillingness of an aging bohemian painter and up-and-coming gallery owner to understand each other plays out in their reaction to a stray dog. In “Redbone,” another painter realizes too late his failure to acknowledge who he’s truly loved. “An Awesome Gap,” about a skateboarding middle schooler who wants his clueless father to understand his passion, beautifully captures the near hopeless yearning of all parents and children. “Easter Morning” also centers on family as men and women handle a young child’s grief over his dead bird differently but without the blindness found in most of this volume. The book’s weak link, “Crying in Italian,” about a woman seemingly plotting to leave her family, teases expectations too obviously to be effective. In the terrific title story, a young writer skates close to endangering his marriage by misinterpreting signals from a woman, assuming their long friendship may no longer be platonic.
The question all these stories pose—“Don’t you find that most people prefer blindness?”—is answered by the hunger of Pye’s characters to connect.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941209-82-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Press 53
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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