A witty, Rabelaisian road story about one man’s search for what matters.
This debut novel follows a young mountain climber’s unconventional quest for enlightenment.
The story introduces readers to Donato, a young man with a mission. After a thunderegg (a sort of geode) falls from a tree on the same day he fails to save a young calf’s life, Donato vows to find the place where souls go when they vanish. The calf’s soul “didn’t go down, it didn’t go sidewise, and it didn’t go into outer space, but it did go up.” In search of this mysterious up, Donato travels the world, first as a student, then as a Navy SEAL, then as a sculptor. His journey takes him from Oregon’s Cascade Range to Mount Bundok in the Philippines to the Dolomite Mountains outside Padua, Italy, and then back to the American Northwest. Many years and many mountains later, he is still looking for answers: “Up seemed just as elusive and intangible as ever, and I wondered if I would ever find it.” Ultimately, he does discover it, and in exactly the place where he least expected to. Among the curious characters readers meet along the way are the hero’s parents, lovable eccentrics Yango and Clotho, who tell young Donato about the mystical Nagah sheep, a bighorn who climbed down a fissure in a mountain and emerged as the North Star. Nagah serves as a sort of governing spirit for the story, an otherworldly but ultimately benevolent lodestar. Mulch writes about Donato’s search in a whimsical, absurdist style with plenty of jokes and fierce exaggerations (stones that float, an anthropomorphic tree frog, and a wise Elf who makes killer veggie burgers all appear in Chapter 15, and that chapter is not an outlier). Mulch operates here very much in the tradition of the American tall tale; there is no blue ox in the book, but there could have been. A grumpy social satire peppers portions of the tale’s second half—the author laments the yuppification of Portland, Oregon, at length. Some readers may find the jokes here underdeveloped and the satire a bit too vague but most should smile throughout this unusual adventure.
A witty, Rabelaisian road story about one man’s search for what matters.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-93563-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2016
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
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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