Sugary fare for the seriously sweet-toothed.
Novelist (Darjeeling, 2002, etc.) and cookbook author Kirchner whisks up a tale of escalating crises—in love, work, family, and career—all serendipitously resolved by spiritual baking lessons.
In a story with as many plotlines as a millefeuille has pastry leaves, narrator Sunya Malhotra begins her tale of woe as her life and work seem about to implode. She lives in Seattle, as does her East Indian mother, who was abandoned by her Indian academic husband when Sunya was two days old. Her father left because he sought a more spiritual life and hasn’t been seen since. Nearly 30, Sunya (her name has a special meaning for Buddhists) is a woman “who loved to bake.” She owns Pastries, a neighborhood bakery and coffeeshop, but seems to have lost her joy in baking when she also lost her Japanese boyfriend Roger, who has a new girlfriend and a new job organizing protests for the up-and-coming World Trade talks. Her woes increase when she learns that a big bakery chain is moving into the neighborhood; her best baker, Pierre, takes off; a man loiters outside her shop; and she finds cards with Japanese writing on them left at her door. Her receipts are also falling, and she may have to sell her store. A meeting and then date with Andrew, a filmmaker in town to make a documentary of the protests, suggests new happiness, but Andrew has major problems, too. The story is padded further with tales of her early life told by Sunya’s mother, but they’re not much comfort. Sunya is saved only when, after learning that the mysterious cards are from the director of a Japanese school that teaches baking as a way to heal the spirit, she heads to Japan. There, she not only rediscovers the joy of baking, but also part of her past.
Sugary fare for the seriously sweet-toothed.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28988-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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