Murphy's (Stories in Another Language, 1987) debut novel is a vivid and often powerful, although almost as often curiously perfunctory, girl's-eye saga of a wildly endangered life in the Far East during and after WW II. It's 1942, and Tian (short for Christiane) tells about being held in a Japanese prison camp in Kontum, Indochina, along with her Chinese father Yeu, her French mother Marcelle, and her dear beloved nanny, teacher, and caretaker—``my amah.'' Torture, fear, murder, and hunger are constant realities (Yeu escapes temporarily to try to join forces with the Montagnards; Marcelle, dreaming of her absent husband, gives birth to her second daughter) before liberation by the Chinese in 1945 sends the family first by foot to Saigon, then by train to Shanghai and the splendidly rich house there that was once home. Not only, however, is Shanghai in ruins, but it's being taken over by the Communists (shown as demonically cruel), whom the once-moneyed family must by necessity flee. Tian's father joins the nationalist army while Tian goes by ship with the others back to Saigon—where another entire novel seems to unfold as the spunky Tian, turning 16, single-handedly supports her family (by translating for the French as they torture Vietnamese prisoners), nurses her mother through typhoid, flies ahead to Biarritz (Marcelle's hometown) to make contact with ``Uncle Robert'' in order that the others can follow. More is still to come before this oddly meandering tale's end, but along the way, and amid the horror, are indisputable sources of pleasure—the droll wisdom of the comically unflappable amah, Marcelle's undying dream of dancing elegantly with her missing husband again, the horse in Saigon that decides to move indoors, then stands looking out a window even after the house itself is ruined. An indefatigably forward-going if often poetic story of girlhood and family amid war, terror, loss—and sometimes luck.
Pub Date: May 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-85012-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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