A raw, sensual odyssey of sex and faith in chaotic, alluring modern-day West Africa.
Thorpe’s (Incompetence, 2015) vivid, impressionistic novel about a Westerner’s strange travels around Mali.
Hank Westland, an American convert to Islam, lives a dissolute life in Bamako, Mali, getting drunk every night and bedding a procession of African women. But his mind is elsewhere, far away; in Timbuktu, his friend professor Kati has been accused of sorcery by a Tuareg extremist militant group called Ansar Dine, and he’s being held in a captivity that he may not survive. Westland wants to travel to save his friend, but first he must go see Al Hajj Tidjani, the leader of the Umarian Tidjanniya order that the American has recently joined as a new convert. He arrives at the compound and greets the wily, enigmatic leader, his wives, and their various daughters; their worldview, inspired by idiosyncratic readings of the Quran and the Hadith, quickly begins to challenge his complacency on a variety of issues. As a Christian minister’s son, he’d spent years teaching at a college in the Pacific Northwest, a laid-back, easygoing area where “a bumper-sticker often seen around town read, ‘Mean People Suck.’ ” By contrast, Westland reflects about West Africa, “You lived here in one day more than most people did in twenty years in the U.S.” His experiences in the camp reel wildly from his usual priapism to steep discussions of various Islamic subjects; an in-camp circumcision scene, though, may have every male reader reflexively wincing. Thorpe’s narrative is lushly sensuous, wonderfully capturing the textures and contradictions of Muslim life in Mali and also offering thought-provoking digressions into the nature of Islam (“The true hajj does not mean traveling to Mecca,” Westland learns at one point, for example. “The true hajj is the hajj to the point of mercy at the very center of your spiritual being”). The result is a somewhat jumbled but instantly memorable novel in the spirit of Paul Bowles’ work.
A raw, sensual odyssey of sex and faith in chaotic, alluring modern-day West Africa.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5075-5000-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
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