Campbell has a talent for imagining lost souls, but he needs a story worthy of them.
A psychiatrist wrestles with his clients’ demons—and his own—in the first novel from Tony Blair’s former spokesperson.
Campbell (The Blair Years, 2007, etc.) set the bar high for his fiction debut, attempting to get inside the heads of numerous patients served by Martin Sturrock, one of London’s premier shrinks. And he often pulls it off; the book contains many virtuoso passages that reflect a rich understanding of depression and its victims. Martin’s clients include Ralph, whose alcoholism is derailing his career as a senior health minister; Emily, a former teacher living in seclusion since a fire disfigured her face; Arta, a refugee from Kosovo who was raped after moving to England; David, a young working-class man wracked by anxiety; and Matthew, whose affairs have prompted his wife to label him a sex addict. Experienced and middle-aged, Martin can almost treat them on autopilot; he assigns homework reading, suggests that they keep dream diaries, asks the proper questions. But after he tells Arta she must forgive the men who raped her, she flees, sparking a weekend’s worth of self-flagellation over his own shortcomings, not least his patronage of prostitutes. Ultimately, Campbell fails to construct a tenable plot from all this. Numerous threads connect all too neatly at the novel’s tragic climax, and the final pages shift into easy melodrama. Before that, though, he crafts some top-notch characterizations. A patient walk-through of Ralph’s day, drink by drink, exposes the emotional and physical devastation he’s sown in himself, and Arta’s post-rape fear of human interaction is handled with a smart mix of empathy and cold realism. These achievements make the clumsy closing chapters all the more frustrating. The author clearly wants to make a case for the complexity and value of psychiatry, but late-stage mawkishness strips the book of its power.
Campbell has a talent for imagining lost souls, but he needs a story worthy of them.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59020-224-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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
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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