An unsettling and uneven blend of fact and fiction in a first novel about one family's involvement with John Wayne. Barden, a freelance writer, did in fact know Wayne: His father, a contractor, had done work on the actor's home. Barden weaves together a series of incidents in his fictionalized family life (including Wayne's attempts to help the family negotiate their misfortunes) with recollections of Wayne's private life. Among the confessional matters covered are Wayne's exuberant sexual appetite, his knowledge of his limitations as an actor, his dreadful insecurity in his decades-long relationship with director John Ford, and his increasing frustration with his (often suffocating) public persona. Apart from a pair of early scenes, one with his first girl, the other detailing an affair with Marlene Dietrich, the story focuses on the last decade in Wayne's life, when the fictionalized Frank Barden worked for him. Invited to Duke's Christmas party in 1971 after having renovated the actor's house, Frank gets drunk and verbally abuses his own wife, Lillian, who had been dancing with an old acquaintance while Frank himself watched Duke and his cronies play poker. The next morning, Duke, arriving to get the car he loaned to Frank the night before, presides over an effort at reconciliation, but Frank, still drunk and surly, refuses his help. Years later, Lillian visits son Danny in the hospital, where he's recovering from a painful operation; the two trade stories about Duke, who is, at that moment, lying in another hospital, close to death. It becomes clear that both the public image and the private man have had a complex influence on the lives and expectations of the Bardens. There are sharp, persuasive glimpses here of the reality of celebrity life and the agony of a family coming apart at the seams, but the novel remains an odd pastiche in which fiction and fact commingle without generating clarity or significant insights.
Pub Date: July 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48709-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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