Often despondent, but the brooding characters will stick in readers’ heads like emotional glue.
A collection of subdued tales features characters who can neither evade the past nor confront the inevitable future.
John Fromme, narrator of the book’s titular and longest story, is a schizophrenic freelance writer. When his wife, Janet, frantically tells him their son, Ted, is missing, the two eventually find him with John’s mother, Charlene. It seems that Ted, ashamed of his dad’s condition, may want to live with Grandma. But as John and Janet argue with Charlene over who should be Ted’s guardian, readers are privy to John’s skewered perception. Voices in his head, for one, are personified, including look-alikes Lana and Carly, who talk to him as Janet and Charlene’s dispute presses on. Charlene points to the family’s history of mental illness, but John’s recollection of his past soon has him questioning his own memories. Characters in the other five, much shorter stories may not have a clearly defined disorder like John, but they are similarly afflicted. Nathan Ploegger, in “The Offering,” for example, is an American obsessed with finding a strange woman he met while touring the Yucatán, an obsession that may prove disastrous. In “I, Singularity,” Harold, blind since birth, experiences unbearable headaches. Surgery may help, but early tests lead to a surprise that could change Harold’s life as well as his relationship with his clingy sister Tess. In many ways, “Complementarities” is reminiscent of a soap opera, as Frankie’s affair with Juanita, the girlfriend of his pal Jimmy Sheephorn, invariably results in deceit and discontent. But like all of the tales, it’s shackled with an almost cruel predetermination: readers, in this case, know from the beginning that Jimmy’s died horribly. Mustin (We Are Strong, But We Are Fragile, 2013, etc.) rounds out his book with “Object of Affection” and “The Phantom.” In the former, a mother tells of her son Carlos, a celebrity athlete whose rise to fame is curtailed by a faster and miserable drop from the spotlight. The latter and closing story is also the most upbeat: baseball fanatic Karl has a shot at a career in his favorite sport—and his grandfather’s special homemade baseball is along for the ride.
Often despondent, but the brooding characters will stick in readers’ heads like emotional glue.Pub Date: April 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943201-05-1
Page Count: 326
Publisher: AuthorMike Ink
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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