A chronicle of lives of quiet desperation lived half a world away, understated and thoughtful, cheerless without being...
Generational novel of loss and miscommunication in a Chinese village.
The sins of the fathers are always visited on the children. Often mentioned as China’s leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, Liu (The Cook, The Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, 2015, etc.) writes of a simple tofu peddler who inherited the job and doesn’t want it. Yang Baishun’s father has only one friend, a carter, and even when it turns out that the friend doesn’t feel the same about him, Old Yang takes a forgiving attitude: “He shouldn’t have had to drive a cart all his life,” he sighs. His son also thinks he has a friend but does not, and so the younger Yang heads out to seek his fortune doing anything other than selling tofu. In time he has a wife and daughter, each of whom he loses: one runs away, one, it seems, is kidnapped. But by whom? The story jumps ahead two generations, and the same things are happening in a newer China: “When he turned thirty-five,” writes Liu of a descendant, “Niu Aiguo knew that there were only three people he could count on if he ran into trouble.” Run into trouble he does, as marriages dissolve, siblings vie, and the members of Yang’s bloodline look back into the past to ponder their mother’s disappearance years earlier. That mystery is in plain sight, for Liu seems concerned with other truths. Though he gives the storyline an indefinite air by not providing a firm chronology, he wants us to know that the story links two worlds, the old China of tiny villages and warlords and the new post-revolutionary one of party dictatorship and a command economy, even as nothing ever changes: “He had lied to her,” he writes. “It was only a minor lie that day. But he had started lying to her a week before, and that was major.” Friendless, untruthful, and unheard, his characters simply endure.
A chronicle of lives of quiet desperation lived half a world away, understated and thoughtful, cheerless without being morose.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7083-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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