Perhaps the most frighteningly plausible doomsday scenario yet to appear in fictional treatments of this seemingly insoluble...
The logic of terrorism is taken to a virtually ultimate extent in this bloodcurdling successor to the pseudonymous author’s highly praised novels (The Attack, 2006, etc.).
It opens in Beirut, with its unnamed narrator’s emotional condemnation of this polyglot metropolis corroded by contact with Western values. His conversations with Dr. Jalal, a renegade Arab critic of jihad “rehabilitated” as an enemy of the West, circle around the subject of the narrator’s mission—which has brought him to Lebanon from Baghdad, whence he had moved from his native Bedouin village (Kafr Karam). The story thus told as an extended flashback embraces his experiences as the son of a disabled well-digger, a hopeful university student whose future plans were casualties of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and his own “re-education” as a victim of foreign invasion. Khadra skillfully solicits our identification with him by creating a persuasively detailed picture of nearly idyllic village life, then he shreds it. The narrator observes the horrific killing of a mentally retarded neighbor whose unstable behavior is misinterpreted by American G.I.s patrolling a highway checkpoint, learns of a missile strike that decimates a wedding party and seethes during a violent search that “shames” his father and his innocent family—and sets him on a vengeful course which is planned to end in a catastrophe “more awesome” than the events of 9/11. This potent novel’s major weakness is its frequent recourse to redundant discursive religious and political argument. Its compensatory strength is in what might be called the anecdotal evidence of injustices and atrocities that motivate its protagonist’s lethal momentum. And when Khadra discloses specific details of his “mission,” the effect strikes like a thunderbolt; your hands all but turn to stone as you turn the pages.
Perhaps the most frighteningly plausible doomsday scenario yet to appear in fictional treatments of this seemingly insoluble crisis. And if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you, you’re not paying enough attention.Pub Date: May 8, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52174-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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