Not high art, but it’ll work for the beach or the plane.
A besotted ex-husband; a boss and lover more handsome than Peter Gallagher; and an overworked FedEx carrier: latter-day love, in all its messy glory.
Maddy Green is a 37-year-old successful art director in an Atlanta ad agency. She’s an only child, an Oberlin College grad, a light drinker. She keeps a small menagerie in her apartment, a cozy place befitting Mary Tyler Moore. She’s been bad, though whether that ended her marriage to the apparently wonderful Jack is something she’s not quite sure about. Indeed, Maddy reflects, “The problem was complicated: Our divorce was amicable. There was none of the usual bitterness.” This latest tale from Stevens (Tattoo Girl, 2001, etc.) begins as an airy and frothy confection, but as it proceeds, both Maddy and Jack and those in their immediate orbit find reasons to be bitter, and things get more interesting. For Maddy’s part, it’s the discovery that strapping, hiking-boot–clad Jack, the heroic hippie born ten years too late for the ’60s, is way less than perfect, even though, three years after the divorce, he’s come calling to announce that he’s mended his ways. On Jack’s part, it’s that Maddy left behind a tangible reminder of her own wayward behavior back in the day. What better than a tropical island getaway for sorting out the mess? Though her story sometimes threatens to dissolve into terminal cuteness and is marred by clumsy passages (“I pushed my long straight brown hair behind my ears”), Stevens has a sure take on the foibles of relationships. Arch and funny, she takes her readers on a bumpy ride, punctuated by nicely observed aperçus (“Never underestimate the difficulties of coming home to an empty apartment every night”; “Talking to a best friend, I’ve noticed, is nearly synonymous with complaining”), that closes with easily foreseen but nonetheless crowd-pleasing fireworks.
Not high art, but it’ll work for the beach or the plane.Pub Date: July 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-451-21202-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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