A meandering account of life among disaffected expatriates that ultimately overstays its visa: a second novel from New Zealander Wilkins (The Miserables, 1993) All the usual confusions that plague young people are prominent among Wilkins's brood, none of whom seems much more adult than the children who have somehow fallen into their care. Adrian Jankowiecz, a university dropout living on the lam in London, finds himself suddenly responsible for the upbringing of his unknown son Daniel when his mother dies and the boy is sent from New Zealand to the custody of his father in England. Adrian, without work, money, or prospects of any kind, takes Daniel to live with him in a squat in Southwark, manages, despite his lack of capital, to put him in a private school, and eventually lands a job in publishing. His boss, a genial incompetent named Timothy Clover, is usually out of town, and the neurotic Mrs. Clover relies upon her nanny Sarah to help take up the slack with the couple's children. Through the nanny network, Sarah becomes friends with Emily, another New Zealander, who looks after the daughter of an American woman in London, and through the Clovers they all get to Adrian and Daniel. We learn a lot about everyone's pasts and their families—Adrian's people were Polish refugees who survived Russian labor camps and escaped to New Zealand, and Timothy Clover is a ne'er-do-well son who has been set up in publishing by embarrassed relatives—but there is an odd absence at the center of the tale. All of the dramas that lie submerged within the plot—Adrian's hapless lethargy, Mrs. Clover's tightly coiled discontent, Daniel's helplessness—come back again and again to the surface but are never fully developed or explained, leaving the narrative seeming rather haphazard and, ultimately, aimless. Rich with shading and detail, but too loosely organized for its own good: a crowded canvas that badly wants some focal point.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4951-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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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