For all the plot events, the story feels scattershot. A more serious problem is that, for all the musing about happiness and...
A debut by the eldest daughter of the late Carol Shields explores the ambitious theme of its title through the prism of a not terribly interesting single woman in Vancouver.
When 32-year-old Maggie tests out one of the self-help quizzes her roommate Rebecca designs for a living, the quiz concludes that, based on her ambivalent response to the question “Are you happy,” Maggie will die in three weeks. Easy-going Maggie loves her job giving mammograms, enjoys her apartment, goes hiking every weekend, has friends and seems pretty content, but the test results unsettle her. She stops sleeping, starts visiting a Catholic church and gradually morphs into someone who receives flattery and favors from everyone she meets. Soon, three men are vying for her attention: sexy fellow hiker Angus, courtly lawyer Charles and gentle do-gooder Leo. Meanwhile, Maggie’s neurotic younger sister Lucy has left her married lover in Italy and come home, pregnant, to become engaged to Ryan. Lucy’s and Maggie’s romantic entanglements generate minimal heat (can Canadian men be as bland as Giardino implies?). After Lucy delivers a baby boy, Maggie accidentally gives the details to Lucy’s Italian lover, who shows up with his wife to demand custody of his heir. Maggie steals the baby from the hospital and ends up hiding out in a French Canadian village near Montreal with a family of strong motherly women. While she and Rebecca are away, her apartment burns down—she’d have died if she’d been home (the prophecy fulfilled?). Maggie returns with the baby, whom Lucy gets to keep after a custody battle, pleads guilty of having taken the infant and gets a short term of house arrest but doesn’t lose her job. Charles dies suddenly of a heart attack, Leo heads to Kosovo and Maggie sees more of Angus.
For all the plot events, the story feels scattershot. A more serious problem is that, for all the musing about happiness and loss, the characters’ emotions never rise above the tepid. Neither will readers’.Pub Date: May 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-074176-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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