Yankee gothic meets Thelma and Louise as Jennings (Mosquito Games, 1989) attempts to give undeserved significance to the Page women of Granite, New Hampshire. The Page family, headed by matriarch Nanna Page, ``who'd never dared to lay claim to infallibility, but who'd considered the possibilities,'' has eked out a marginal existence in run-down shacks in Page Village on a hillside above the town. Page men have been congenitally weak, always secondary to their women, who've never been timid about teaching them a lesson—even if it involves locking a favorite son in a shed and setting it on fire, a scene that Sarah, the protagonist, witnessed as a child when Grandmother Nanna found out that son Billy had raped his niece. Sarah, who also saw the rape, had been abandoned by their mother, Ella, a victim of ``Nanna's claws,'' who'd first tried to sell her. She's now a young grandmother whose grief has turned inward. When son Wayne and his wife Charlotte sell their baby, Sarah walks out—literally—and heads for strong daughter Hannah, who as a child had helped Sarah through her depression by staying home from school to prevent her mother from committing suicide. Alternating with flashbacks to the past, Sarah, now pregnant, helps Hannah with her own breakdown, then returns home to find Charlotte living with her husband Russ, and Wayne dumping toxic chemicals in the woods. Determined to stop him, she takes drastic action. Like grandmother Nanna, ``she sniffed his weakness and went for the throat. She wanted him, for once, to be held accountable, to face up to what he'd done.'' After Wayne's dealt with, Sarah contentedly raises her baby and savors ``whatever small truths may catch in her modest nets.'' Pretentious writing and gratuitous exploitation of fashionable themes, with stock characters in an equally worked-over setting. Still, faint glimmers of promise.
Pub Date: July 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-198367-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
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
BOOK REVIEW
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