The conflicts enmeshing all these characters, as each becomes embroiled in Marcus and India’s “assisted gestation” scheme,...
Four women confront the quandaries surrounding modern motherhood, in Weiner’s fraught latest (In Her Shoes, 2002, etc.).
The four narrators of this cautionary tale of motherhood wouldn’t be where they are without serious parenting issues. Trust-fund baby Bettina’s father, Marcus, a Wall Street kingpin, was so devastated when her mother decamped to Taos to follow a guru, that he fell prey to an airbrushed gold digger, India, who, Bettina believes, not only tricked him into marriage but into reproducing by surrogacy. Jules, a work-study student at Princeton, becomes an egg donor to earn enough to put her father, a formerly respectable high school teacher whose career and marriage exploded after a drunken vehicular felony, through rehab. Annie, happily married, still anguishes over the expense of raising two rambunctious boys and maintaining a ramshackle family farmhouse on her husband Frank’s salary as a TSA officer. To replenish the family coffers, Frank reluctantly agrees to let her become a surrogate mother—very reluctantly, it turns out. India, abandoned by her own mother, fled to Hollywood from Connecticut at 18. Failing to take Hollywood by storm, she reinvented herself as a publicist, shedding years and pounds with the aid of false documents and surgical enhancements. At 37, India, a rising Manhattan PR star, ensnares Marcus by helping him order coffee at Starbucks. Bettina hires a detective, discovering India's real age (43) and other truths so shocking that they cannot be revealed until the end of the novel. Nonetheless, her brothers and her laid-back Buddhist mother refuse to help her dislodge India—there’s plenty of money to go around, after all. Besides, could that unfamiliar discomfiture Bettina is experiencing be sympathy for her stepmother? And could India actually be factoring love into her calculations of Marcus’ net worth?
The conflicts enmeshing all these characters, as each becomes embroiled in Marcus and India’s “assisted gestation” scheme, are gripping, and Weiner’s elucidation of socio-economic determinism is as sharp as ever. However, the ending does not so much jump the shark as de-fang it.Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1772-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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