An evocative portrayal of a Baton Rouge childhood, but hampered by contrived “revelations.”
Lawrence’s debut alternates between 1995 and the early 1950s as an agricultural pamphlet-writer gets a wake-up call from the days when she was known as Bonita Gabriel.
Jane Mitchell is plodding through a deliberately obscure life in Baton Rouge, writing pamphlets on fruit for Louisiana’s Department of Agriculture, when she gets a phone call one morning from the coroner saying two things: her father is dead, and her younger sister, Mary Gabriel, is living in a mental institution. Jane has seen neither of them for 30 years, despite all three having remained in the same city, and the novel slowly pursues the mystery of why Jane—known in childhood by her first name, Bonita—fled her previous life. Every other chapter tells the 1995 story of Jane rediscovering her sister, planning her father’s funeral, and coming to terms with the tragic (but undisclosed) events of her past. Interposed are her memories of growing up with a mentally ill sister who often runs away from home, refuses to speak, and is the object of neighborhood kids’ cruelty. Lawrence’s portrait of middle-class girlhood in Baton Rouge is vivid, especially her treatment of Bonita’s complicated loyalty to her sister. Mary’s presence frustrates Bonita’s attempts to participate in preadolescent rites of passage: she discovers boys but has to take Mary along when she meets them at the movies; she befriends the girl next door, who turns out to be Mary’s cruelest tormentor. Along the way, Bonita also catches a glimpse of a poorer man’s life, that of Orlando Dupanthis, a neighborhood watchman who seems to understand Mary better than anyone else. As a coming-of-ager, the tale is quietly compelling; unfortunately, the mystery plot throws a wrench into things. The solution to the big questions here is far from inevitable; and once it’s revealed, the novel deflates like a pierced balloon.
An evocative portrayal of a Baton Rouge childhood, but hampered by contrived “revelations.”Pub Date: June 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28541-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
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
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