A woman (a Yankee, no less) finds her destiny in the Mississippi Delta in a first novel that, despite its ambitions, comes across as a good ol' southern tale of family secrets, racial clashes, and steel magnolia women. From childhood, Margaret Cape has been told that she has a ``story of her own.'' Her father, a Massachusetts doctor, assures her that the story will be revealed only ``if she learn[s] to seek it.'' Margaret spends the rest of her life looking for signs that she's on the right track, first in her native New England, later in Mississippi. The narrative is told in sections that move back and forth between her past and the months following the fatal fall of Margaret's son, 43-year-old Chapin Finley Cape. This fall not only precipitates a search for missing wills by relatives and developers who have designs on Rosamond, the ancestral plantation that belongs to Margaret, but awakens her from the catatonic state into which she'd slipped in 1966. Margaret, a nurse, had fallen in love with the much-older Big John Cape, who'd come north in 1937 for treatment of what he thought was a fatal disease. He lived, but his wife died, and Margaret, entranced with his stories of the Cape family and Rosamond, soon accepted Big John's proposal and settled on the family plantation. When Big John dies, Margaret marries his son, the rough, violent John Buie, and has two sons (Buie and Chapin) of her own. By the 1960s, racial change is roiling Mississippi, and her beloved son Buie—in love with Caraly, his black childhood friend—pays a terrible penalty for marrying her. John Buie dies on the same day as his son, and Margaret becomes catatonic. When justice is finally served, after documents are found hidden in the decaying Rosamond, the now-awakened Margaret's story is complete. Shades of Grisham, Percy, and Welty, in a story that tries too hard to be too much.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100248-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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