An entertaining novel that paints a fine portrait of 1960s New York, even if it does sometimes plow familiar dramatic...
In this novel of a New York City Italian-American family in the 1960s, a mother and daughter both long for love but end up with drama.
Thirty-four-year-old Maria Campisi is an unhappy wife and mother. Her large family gathers every Sunday night for dinner, and during this weekly ritual, her husband, Luigi, berates her, her sister-in-law looks down on her, and her mother-in-law, Nonna, belittles her. However, she takes some solace in the fact that people often mistake her to be her daughter’s sister. Meanwhile, her daughter, 15-year-old Angelina, dresses like a greaser and goes to bra-burning protests with her friends. Their lives both change when Luigi hires contractors to work on their house—among them the handsome Pasquale. Maria feels an immediate attraction to him, basking in the glow of his attention and compliments. But Angelina also swoons over Pasquale, especially after her own boyfriend, Ford, pressures her into sex she doesn’t want to have. Family tensions at home make matters worse, as Nonna keeps disappearing for hours at a time and acting mysterious. Maria gets in too deep with Pasquale, and as she backpedals, Angelina tries to use him as a pawn in a plan of her own. But when Luigi catches Pasquale in his teenage daughter’s bed, Pasquale is arrested, Maria is beside herself; meanwhile, Angelina and Nonna still both have secrets. The women of the family will have to come together for the Campisis to have a happy ending. The story unfolds amidst the volatile events of the ’60s, including the Vietnam War, “free love” and women’s liberation. These cultural markers are sometimes heavy-handed, but they’re tempered slightly by the effectively used signposts of an urban Italian-American family: cannoli, marinara sauce, stickball and more. With two first-person narrators telling the story—mother and daughter in alternating chapters—the novel sometimes reads like a diary, as they both reveal their feelings and grievances. Overall, however, the characters are compelling and well-drawn, and the story moves at a quick clip. Some readers may wish for a different, more independent ending for the heroines, but they’ll at least get the satisfaction of watching mother and daughter come together.
An entertaining novel that paints a fine portrait of 1960s New York, even if it does sometimes plow familiar dramatic territory.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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