This small-town drama is jam-packed with revelations and sweet portraits that stick.
An ambitious debut novel that will make you cry, cringe, and laugh.
In 1967, two women—Bette Parsons, the mother of five, and Alice McFee—disappear from a rural town in Canada called Fraser Arm. The scars left by this mystery lay the groundwork for the novel. “Sometimes pain brings people together, helps them to cross the grand abyss of human discord,” says Lulu Parsons, one of Bette's children, as she begins narrating the story years later. “Sometimes it’s too late.” Higdon lovingly excavates the truth behind the women's disappearance, a story buried beneath years of secrecy, trauma, and small-town drama—but does not hesitate to add plenty of salt to the wounds first. There are gaspworthy moments from the beginning to the very last chapter. Though the character count might seem intimidating, Higdon successfully fills Fraser Arm with complex characters who grow and change as the novel unfurls. For example, Doris Tenpenny, the preacher’s daughter, who is mute but sees everything, is brilliant and unforgettable (“Apart from wild mushrooms, which are sometimes tricky to identify and occasionally poisonous, Doris thinks wild people are quite similar to wild food—likeable and interesting”). Her observations are key to understanding the rest of the town. For most of the book's length, the perspective pivots between Lulu's first-person narration and Doris' third-person point of view and follows the tale for five decades without being wed to a linear timeline. The reader is quickly drawn into the intimate details of the lives of the town's inhabitants, compassionately crafted and carefully doled out. From shame to sexual abuse to the undermentioned strain of motherhood, this debut novelist boldly takes on a lot. While the absent father is a tired archetype, a sympathetic story of an absent mother is rare.
This small-town drama is jam-packed with revelations and sweet portraits that stick.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77041-416-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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