Affecting, but lacking real teeth.
A grieving mother uses her daughter as an artistic muse, complicating and ultimately destroying the girl’s vulnerable adolescence: an achingly straightforward debut set in the Boston suburbs.
Four years ago, four-year-old Jonas Begley drowned in the backyard pond while his mother, Marian, was on the phone and 11-year-old sister Nina wasn't paying attention. Now, in atonement, Nina has offered herself as a subject for Marian’s paintings in order to draw her out of a prolonged depression. Innocuous enough at first, the canvases soon are all nudes, and as Marian works single-mindedly toward her first big show, she fails to recognize the danger of publicly exposing her daughter's fragile, changing 15-year-old body. Henry, Nina's father, objects vigorously; his clashes with Marian about artistic expression endanger their marriage. Nina, on the other hand, grows increasingly confused. Pursued by big-time art critic Leo Beck, her mother's former lover, Nina falls under his sway, both to get back at her manipulative mother and to assert her own sexuality. Hassinger builds her touching drama with a refreshingly undramatic simplicity, as Nina, a ballet dancer, begins to scrutinize her body as others might see it. Her state of painful disembodiment and the oily Beck’s machinations are torturous to witness; unlike Nina, the reader knows what’s coming. Hassinger keeps the story tightly focused on the surviving family of three, whose tenuous structure is threatened by the few outside characters: Beck; Nina’s bold new friend Raissa, who also serves as a potential sexual partner; and a few objectionable folks in the art world. The author is loath to present any of the Begleys, especially Marian, in an unflattering light, a reluctance that lessens the story’s emotional force. The sad outcome to Nina’s plight is hastily smothed over (relegated to “family therapy”) before the reader has a chance to eperience the climax, especialy with regard to a satisfying resolution between Nina and her mother.
Affecting, but lacking real teeth.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15062-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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