The plot is practically nonexistent (the title says it all, almost literally), but Marchetta’s first solo effort—the story of Frankie Ferraro and the three most significant women in his life—is strangely gripping and unexpectedly satisfying for pulpy romance, perhaps thanks to the author’s tight, fast-moving style. Francis Ferraro is born in 1939 on Long Island to traditional Italian parents—Dolly and Sal—who have “made it big” with their contract sewing factory, which Sal hopes to pass on someday to his only son. But Frankie has other plans for himself—his friendship with Dan Colvington, a wealthy, mannered preppie, has given him a glimpse of a way of life he perceives as far superior to his immigrant parents’ plastic-covered-furniture notions of taste. And it’s through Dan that Frankie meets the kind of people he’s been dreaming about—’society people——and even falls in love with a distant relative of Dan’s, a pot-smoking, spoiled, trust-funded blond named Miranda. Frankie doesn’t know about Miranda’s troubled family life, and although she agrees to elope with him and they spend many luminous months in a Greenwich Village hovel (which Miranda finds charmingly rustic), disaster strikes when Frankie learns the truth of Miranda’s past. Years pass, and Frankie marries Annabel, an aristocratic, alluring woman who mothers his first child, Maud. When Annabel flips and kidnaps Maud, Frankie wages war to find the daughter he’s been neglecting for years; although Maud is regained, Annabel is out of the picture for good. After striking out twice, Frankie has given up hope, but his faithful, long-suffering assistant Martha shows him that true love more often than not finds you, rather than the other way around. Marchetta, co-writer of Ivana Trump’s two novels (Free to Love, 1993, etc.), is far better on her own: Frankie and his strong-willed women defy stereotyping in ways that are unusual for the genre, and the overall message seems genuinely heartfelt.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18226-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
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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