Last time the world heard from Judy Barton she was tumbling out of the bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista to her death, but it turns out the ethereal beauty of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo has more to say.
Barton is telling her own tale this time around, and she’s just as frustratingly enigmatic as she ever was in the movies—but that turns out to be a good thing. Initially, the flat, first-person narrative feels bogged down in the banality of Barton’s pre-San Francisco existence. The years she spends growing up in America’s heartland in a picture-perfect nuclear family carry the verisimilitude of tranquility, and tragedy is a foregone conclusion. It takes a while to escape it all (or is that merely subterfuge, à la Alfred?), and there are layers of chaos roiling just below the calm, much like the Hitchcock classic itself. Authors Powers and McLeod have a lot to say about the suppression of women during America’s “Happy Days,” and they do so quite deftly. The plot picks up in the final third of the book as Barton’s date with the bell tower looms, and she’s revealed as the most fantastic cipher—most tragically to herself, and all but oblivious to the deepening depths of her own anger and desolation. All of which, sadly, makes her the perfect pigeon for Gavin Elster’s elaborate machinations to murder his wife and make it look like suicide. The authors could have easily used numerous inside references to the cinematic Vertigo but instead show restraint. (A Jake “Stewart” posing as a disappointing love interest for Barton shows up suspiciously at one point, but that’s about it.) Ultimately, this is a serious work. Barton doesn’t acquit herself a half century after her fatal plunge, but she does spread the blame around to where it belongs. A multifaceted journey for devotees of Vertigo to contemplate and enjoy.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615589848
Page Count: 181
Publisher: PM Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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