Italicized flashbacks, stream-of-consciousness interludes, infidelities, prison breaks, murderous revenge, biblical...
A young drifter odysseys through the gothic menagerie that is rural Tennessee in Gay’s (Little Sister Death, 2015, etc.) posthumously published novel.
We meet Billy Edgewater in Memphis in 1955. He’s in his early 20s, recently discharged from the Navy, and on his way home to eastern Tennessee, where his father lies dying. But for Edgewater, “a fugitive of order” who finds—or brings—disaster wherever he goes, this is no straightforward voyage; things just seem to get in the way, and decisions he barely makes have life-altering consequences. He enters a bar, is attacked by a drunk, and then is arrested for it. Hitchhiking, he is wooed by “the comfort of the upholstery” and finds himself carried heinously off course. He gets a ride with a one-armed con man named Roosterfish (perhaps the most delightful character in a novel full of them), with whom he conducts spurious bug exterminations (the poison they spray isn’t poison) and paints barn roofs with “a mixture of cheap re-refined motor oil” that resembles paint but will wash off in the rain. He falls in with the unforgettable Buddy Bradshaw, an “involuntary refugee from the American dream” who looks “like a farm boy’s fantasy of what a cheap gigolo must be.” Throughout, Gay’s midcentury Tennessee is a realm of bad weather and small-town lowlifes, vagrancy laws, and bootleg liquor; every man is a drunk, alternately listless and lustful and violent; every woman is defined by the use she makes (or once made, or will make) of her body. Yet there is humor in this bleakness, and it bubbles up from the same human springs as the cruelty and violence. And readers will be wooed (or perhaps frustrated) by the rich (or overwritten) language characteristic of Southern gothic writers: For example, a river, to Edgewater, seems “some lost highway of the undone, accommodating not wayfarers like themselves but debris and artifacts jettisoned by souls lost upon it, empty gestures of appeasement, offerings to a god not listening anymore.”
Italicized flashbacks, stream-of-consciousness interludes, infidelities, prison breaks, murderous revenge, biblical language, and a deep kinship between the land and its inhabitants—Gay’s novel is full-on Southern gothic and will delight fans of the genre.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945814-52-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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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