The same structural shakiness that undermined A Midnight Clear and Scumbler affects this new Wharton effort: an overwhelming metaphor soaks through the otherwise crisp-enough narrative, making it soggy (here it's actually a double story, joined) and, worse, utterly pre-ordained. Wharton's a good enough novelist to keep you hoping this wet and shaggy theme will stand, shake itself off, and surprise you—yet it doesn't happen. The two complementary plots? In the summer of 1938, a Philadelphia factory worker, getting too much heat because of his union activities, spirits his young family off to Wildwood, New Jersey, for an unscheduled vacation (the kids have been threatened by company goons). Appearing on the boardwalk that summer is a motorcycle/animal act owned by a WW I hero, an ex-car-racer named Sture Modig. "The Wall of Death" features a wooden ramp/pit, whirling cycles (ridden by Sture and a younger man—who also is sleeping with Sture's wife) and Tuffy, who rides in a sidecar and is a lion that Sture has had since it was a cub. How the narrator of half the book, Dickie Kettleson, son of the factory worker, finally has a fateful hand in the (disastrous) freeing of Tuffy is the eventual braid here. But you've seen it coming from the beginning, is the problem: the title has given it all away, even: Pride—pride of lions, pride of family, of work, of protectiveness, of bravery. Wharton does try to shadow it a little, with the eerily effective sub-metaphors he's so good at, usually interiors of different kinds: the Wall of Death, sand castles on the beach, the box Dickie keeps his kitten in (who's a minor Tuffy, all too obviously)—but the main man/lion contrast rolls ponderously over all that (Wharton even interweaves a chapter on the behavior of lions in the wild—in case someone's been napping). The inertness of the theme will in the end completely stave in the book, allowing it little of Birdy's or Dad's plain mysteriousness. Still and all, Wharton remains the contemporary novelist perhaps closest to what could be called Frank Capra-style American storytelling: class-conscious, do-an-honest-job, optimistic, loving. Pride, like all his other books, is imbued by these merits—and is scuttled only by its urge to italicize it all unnecessarily.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1985
ISBN: 1557042594
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
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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