Rueful but never regretful, warmhearted and witty: a treat for Maupin’s many fans.
The central figure in Tales of the City returns two decades later and brings us up to date on most of the popular series’ other characters as well.
Michael is now 55 and HIV-positive, but his meds keep him healthy, along with shots of testosterone administered by 33-year-old live-in boyfriend Ben, who thinks older men are hot. They even got married at City Hall, though of course Michael’s born-again mother, brother and sister-in-law down in Florida flinch every time he refers to Ben as his husband. Fortunately, he’s still got the emotional support of former landlady Anna Madrigal, now 85 and in fragile health, and straight pal Brian Hawkins, sole owner of the nursery they founded together. (Back when Michael thought he was going to die, he decided he’d rather plant gardens.) Brian’s ex Mary Ann, a fellow alum of 28 Barbary Lane, long ago decamped for Connecticut and a stockbroker husband, but their daughter Shawna carries on the San Francisco bohemian tradition as a cheerfully bisexual blogger who chronicles “her escapades in the pansexual wonderland.” So things are good and not so very different from the old days on Barbary Lane as Maupin brings his characters into middle age with his customary blend of ready humor, frank sex scenes (that always seem kind of sweet) and unrepentant antagonism toward the red-state Americans who hate Michael and his kind. Those folks include Michael’s biological family. Michael’s mother, meanwhile, is dying of emphysema, and Michael, who’s faced his own mortality, as well as that of lovers and friends, must now grapple with an impending death that connects him to people with whom he otherwise has nothing in common. Michael’s detested father, though dead for many years, provides a startling final plot twist that enables Michael to make tentative peace with brother Irwin, and Anna’s heart attack prompts Michael to declare allegiance to his true family. Thirty years later, he’s still proud of the life he’s made and the city that made it possible.
Rueful but never regretful, warmhearted and witty: a treat for Maupin’s many fans.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-076135-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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