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BAY OF ARROWS

A literate and literary romp through history and contemporary academia as Parini (The Last Station, The Patch Boys, etc.) gently indicts Christopher Columbus and his fictional protagonist, poet Christopher ``Geno'' Genovese, for their patriarchal misdeeds. A tenured professor at a small Vermont college, 40-year-old Geno, bored with teaching, wants to escape to a warm climate where he can write poems about Columbus. But when his application for a study grant is turned down, and he's ongoingly frustrated with the pettiness of academia—nicely satirized—and with the inevitable misunderstandings of married life, Geno has a brief affair with a student that leads to charges of sexual harassment. Wife Susan, unhappy and dissatisfied, accuses him of being an indifferent father; and his two young sons ignore him. Parallelling Geno's decline and fall is the story of Columbus's equally frustrated search for money and advancement. The similarities between the two men are numerous—both share the same name, both had fathers who failed, both are ambitious dreamers who neglect their wives; and just as Columbus is serendipitously saved by Queen Isabella of Spain, so Geno is equally magnificently rescued: He receives a half-million-dollar tax-free ``genius'' grant from the MacAlastair Foundation. Geno and family head for the Dominican Republic and, on the very Bay of Arrows where Columbus landed, build a house. Here, Geno becomes the quintessential patriarch, bullying his family about. But like Columbus, who turns out to be more sensitive than suspected, Geno—when tried by God and Noam Chomsky, among others, in a magic-realism trial—changes in time. The idyll ends with ``a whelm of conclusiveness,'' and Geno ``sets off, chastened, into life again.'' Witty, imaginative, and refreshing reprise of the now increasingly worked-over Columbus saga, but for all the insights and originality, an ultimately contrived concept.

Pub Date: Aug. 28, 1992

ISBN: 0-8050-1676-7

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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