A very adult remake of an after-school special that’s driven by story, not lessons.
Minor vices and poor timing wreak havoc on the life of a reluctant housewife.
This debut novel by Klein owes much to the dramas of Tom Perrotta, mimicking the subdued desire and quiet angst of a certain breed of suburbanite. The focus here is drugs: who has them, why they use them, who’s supplying them, and why America has such a jones for the stuff. Our main prism into this multifaceted tale is 30-something mother-of-two Gwen Raine, who needs a little something to help her unwind. After scoring $500 worth of weed from her ex-boyfriend, an ambitious but unethical restaurateur named Jude Gates, Gwen smashes into a pensioner with dementia, killing him instantly. Though she wasn’t at fault, Gwen soon finds herself on the wrong side of a small-town detective with a mean streak who threatens to charge her with felony possession and endanger her custody of her kids unless she fesses up to who gave her the dope. This story line has plenty of verve, but Klein muddies up the water with a less interesting subplot. Ironically, Gwen’s husband Brian is an executive at a pharmaceutical company, one that is riskily marketing antidepressants as fat-fighting drugs. Meanwhile, Jude is deeply embedded in a scheme to bring massive amounts of hard drugs, not to mention trafficked girls, across the border through Montreal. He thinks it’s the deal that will buy him freedom, but as we all know from too many movies, the deal doesn’t usually go down like it should. Klein has a nimble storytelling style, and readers who dig these types of melodramas will find some richly intertwined stories. If he can learn not to throw in the whole kitchen sink, this novelist will have a promising future.
A very adult remake of an after-school special that’s driven by story, not lessons.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-71681-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
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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