Men will break your heart, but sisterhood is powerful in this uneven but arresting second novel by the author of Locas (1997). That’s sisterhood as a blood relationship, not a political movement, though there are also echos of “brown female power” feminism in Murray’s gritty tale of growing up scandalous in East L.A. For the most part, however, Rita Zapata finds the Mexican-American women in her poverty-stricken neighborhood quick to judge her a putana like her promiscuous mother. It’s Rita’s younger sister, Dolores, who saved her after she accidentally set her hair on fire as a teenager, who claims her heart and her fiercest loyalty—until Billy Navarro shows up. Rita has slept with most of East L.A.’s aspiring boxers (indeed, most of its men, period) in her search for someone on his way up and out who—ll take her with him, and in Billy she finds not only a potential champ but a man who understands her. “You want better than what you got,” he tells Rita, “You got dreams.” For a while Billy seems to fulfill them. He takes her with him on his ascent to a title bout in Las Vegas, and his win gains her some grudging respect from “las girlfriends,” even though they prefer the respectably married Dolores. But identity won through a man can be lost the same way, and Rita hits bottom around about the time Dolores’s political activism indirectly gets her husband killed and riots in 1997 nearly incinerate the Hispanic ghetto. Murray has a sharp eye for the particulars of Mexican-American life, and her prose is juicily vivid. But there’s a fine line between affirming the values of an ethnic subculture and reinforcing its stereotypes; Murray’s hot-mama Latinas and their swaggering men seem perilously close to the latter. Readable and intelligent, though this writer of promise and ferocious energy needs to scrutinize her subject matter a little more deeply.
Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1642-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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