A stimulating philosophical work that’s short on storytelling.
Hale’s debut novel presents the story of a woman who awakes from a coma with a message from God.
Leah Warner survived a car crash but is now in a coma from which she isn’t expected to awake. Somehow, she does; also, the broken bones and extensive skin lacerations have begun to heal at an extraordinary rate. A medical miracle? Leah believes it’s a divine one. In her coma, she saw God, who has sent her back to Earth with a message: “It is a message of love. God loves us and wants us to love each other in the same way. God wants us to embrace humility and selflessness instead of acquisition and achievement.” The novel then uses the familiar device of framing a philosophical discussion as fiction: in this case, the question is over what sort of evidence the public will accept as proof of the existence of God. What follows is an account of Leah’s attempts to deliver her message, drawing the adoration of some and the ire of others. Her story is intercut with lectures by professor Stephen Bradshaw—“widely considered one of the four or five most influential living philosophers.” His lectures often revolve around the ubiquity of inductive reasoning in life: “Just because our senses have been accurate before does not guarantee that they are accurate now.” The ideas are interesting, deliberative, and intellectually honest, and readers curious about the limitations of scientific knowledge and atheism should enjoy this book in the same way one enjoys a good staged discussion series. Fans of fiction, however, won’t find much beyond philosophy; there’s little plot. Hale is a great craftsman of dialogue; he is less adept at scenes, where movement is often blocky and reminiscent of stage direction. Most disappointingly, the characters are not quite characters so much as they are stand-ins for various intellectual perspectives, and as such, the reader’s emotional investment never becomes very large.
A stimulating philosophical work that’s short on storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1506188911
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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