First published in Britain, a novel that movingly details how three generations of idealists try to find meaning and purpose as their country, Sri Lanka, becomes another killing field. The author, born in Sri Lanka, infuses the story with palpable feeling for his country and its plight. Once a place of shared values and tolerance, the tropical island is now riven by sectarian violence as the Hindu guerrillas—“Tamil Tigers”—fight for independence from the majority, the Buddhist Sinhalese. Sivanandan carefully explores the causes of the civil war. He’s often less successful, though, with the characters, most of whom are Tamil. Many seem more like fleshed-out representations of ideas and historical forces than complex human beings. The narrative focuses on three men: Sahadevan, his son Rajan, and Rajan’s stepson Vijay. Sahadevan, who was born in a northern Tamil village where drought and crop failure were endemic, leaves the countryside to get an education, and works for the post office in the last years of British colonial rule. He and his friends are socialists who dream of a fair and just society. Son Rajan, born in 1930, an idealist like his father, becomes a schoolteacher, but during his life, post-independence dreams wither as politicians enrich themselves and cynically foment divisions. When his wife Lali, a Sinhalese, is raped and killed by Sinhalese vigilantes who think she’s a Tamil, he despairingly flees to Britain. And finally Vijay, who is lovingly reared by his old grandparents, joins the rebels as a student, teaches, marries unhappily, and, while trying to save his rapidly disintegrating country, gets caught in the cross-currents and dies near the old family home. At times the melodrama—too many people die on cue—undercuts what is essentially an anguished tale of dying dreams and hopes deferred. Instructive and deeply felt.
Pub Date: May 18, 1998
ISBN: 1-900850-01-X
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Arcadia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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