Braver (Divine Sarah, 2004) makes an ambitious attempt to examine how accidents harden into fate and tries to coordinate too...
A second’s inattention changes the shape of a woman’s life.
Claire Andrews is a well-respected van Gogh scholar and newly single university professor. Her life has a predictable pattern: teaching, researching, socializing with a few close friends. If she isn’t exactly going through the motions, she is at the very least treading a well-worn path, but after she strikes and kills a young boy with her car, the comfortable order of her world is permanently altered. Perhaps more disorienting than the accident itself are the responses it elicits. Claire’s university, anxious about bad publicity, wishes her to take a leave; her neighbors cannot meet her eye; and the boy’s family sues for wrongful death. In the midst of her trauma, Claire finds two bright spots: her estranged husband’s unexpectedly loyal response to her grief; and her own newfound curiosity about the last days of van Gogh’s life when he painted Crows Over the Wheatfield. Braver’s novel moves between Claire’s struggle to cope with the disintegration of her personal life in the wake of the accident, and a research trip to France during which she discovers new information about van Gogh. In both narratives, Claire is attuned to the significance of single moments in which the world and our perceptions of it can change in momentous and irreversible ways. Despite the care with which the author alternates between Claire’s scholarly and personal trials, a strategy echoed in the novel’s switching between passages about van Gogh’s trauma and Claire’s suffering, the juxtaposition can be both facile and jarring. The self-discoveries Claire makes in France have a formulaic, scripted quality that makes Claire unlikable and unbelievable. Prone to uttering sophomoric platitudes about art and life, Claire seems more concussed than introspective after her accident, a matter not helped by the stilted quality of the characters’ dialogue.
Braver (Divine Sarah, 2004) makes an ambitious attempt to examine how accidents harden into fate and tries to coordinate too many stories, yet he has no central character strong enough to synthesize them.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-078232-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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