Nimble prose and an ironic but not smart-alecky stance keep this story moving along nicely—a promising start.
A post-postmodern rock ’n’ roll novel, entertaining and surprisingly elegant.
The title notwithstanding, the tutelary spirit of this suicide-rich novel is not Sylvia Plath but David Foster Wallace, to whom debut novelist Altschul owes the judicious use of the sometimes parodic footnote. Both drink from the well of Gravity’s Rainbow, but there’s a lot of sly reference to the everyday pop culture and the vernacular of our times along with all the learned literariness, as when the book’s heroine, young Calliope Bird Morath, takes on Charlie Rose (“Wow. You don’t waste any time, do you?”), and when their travels find some of the dramatis personae on a Garpian book tour (“Books! All this attention to books! Not politicians, not teenybopper pop-stars, not that dreadful Brad Pitt: a writer…I was so excited, it was all I could do not to strip naked and run around Courthouse Square.”). As if that were not enough, underlying it all is the lovely framework of The Odyssey. The story opens with Calliope’s recounting the suicide of her father, a famous punk rocker, and the devastating effect of the death on her mother, herself perhaps descended from rock royalty—though not, as rumor has it, “illegitimate offspring of a groupie and the drummer of the MC5.” But did Dad really leave the planet? Calliope, a silent songbird who slowly finds her expression, come adolescence, in brittle poetry, thinks not, as she tells the perplexed, aforementioned Rose; likening herself to Telemachus and her mother to Penelope, she sets off on a strange quest to find him among the lotus-eaters. The footnotes fly, the pop-culture references and allusions (Kim Deal, Beavis and Butthead, the collected works of Dave Eggers) come ever faster, and Calliope makes her way through the world, her tale narrated by both herself and a not-so-omniscient, inquisitive author who relies on eavesdropping and other subterfuge to come by his information—a modern trope if ever there was one.
Nimble prose and an ironic but not smart-alecky stance keep this story moving along nicely—a promising start.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101484-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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