A slight bagatelle in which even the weightiest topics are sloughed off like suntan lotion in a tropical rainstorm.
Three old friends and one newbie try to revive a vacation tradition, with mixed results.
The self-styled Girls of August are an intrepid band of doctors’ wives who have gotten together for annual summer sprees ever since Cornelia—the rich, blonde consort of party-animal physician Teddy—invited them to share her beach retreat. None of the other “girls”—Rachel, Barbara and narrator Maddy—actually liked Cornelia, but no matter; Teddy soon replaced her with the more copacetic Melinda. For the past three years, ever since Melinda’s tragic accidental death—Teddy was drunk at the wheel—the girls have stayed home, but then this summer, Baby, Teddy’s 20-something third wife, entices them to familiar Siddons territory, the South Carolina barrier islands. Baby’s opulent home is located on the deserted and fictional Tiger Island, virtually unpopulated except for a resident enclave of Gullah people. Gloriously incommunicado (the only cellphone having met its demise), the women drink, cook delicious meals and swim. But problems soon surface: Maddy suffers from intermittent nausea, Rachel almost drowns, and Barbara seems to be sliding into serious alcoholism. Baby is the source of much humor and rue among the 40-ish women: Not only is she blonde and independently wealthy like her predecessor, Cornelia, she enjoys flaunting her nubile figure by skinny-dipping. Perhaps to escape all the perimenopausal sarcasm, Baby disappears for long stretches. Is she having an affair with handsome Gullah fisherman Earl or merely plotting revenge? Someone removes the screen from Barbara’s window, letting in stinging bugs, and Maddy’s bed collapses one night. Has it all devolved into the middle-aged Southern version of summer camp farce? Nothing unpredictable or challenging can survive the many clichés—the wise and vaguely mystical Gullahs, the stereotypically airheaded trophy wife and the other characters who somehow lack the mettle of Steel Magnolias but who might qualify as copper or tin.
A slight bagatelle in which even the weightiest topics are sloughed off like suntan lotion in a tropical rainstorm.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-446-52795-8
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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