Suburban noir—dark, funny and sometimes creepy; readers may be surprised at the amount of empathy they end up feeling for...
A novel from Ginsberg (The Grift, 2008, etc.) about a middle-class, seemingly genteel San Diego neighborhood teeming with secrets that unravel in the aftermath of a California wildfire.
Spreading fire forces the residents to evacuate in October 2007. Once the neighbors return home, they realize that one of them has disappeared: Diana, a teenage mother who has been living in her father’s house for only a few months. Flash back to July and pregnant Diana’s sudden arrival—she had been raised by her African-American mother in Las Vegas—which badly disrupts the childless marriage of her dad Joe, a restaurant manager who has avoided any contact with his daughter, and his pretty blond wife Allison. Through the summer and fall Allison, who still resents that Joe pressed her to abort when she became pregnant early in their relationship, slips into a drunken funk, while Joe slides into an affair with a sleazy neighbor. Diana hangs out with Kevin, the neighborhood druggie. Kevin’s uptight parents Dick and Dorothy seem like Republican caricatures, but Dorothy is covering up more than her daily pill-popping. And her unlikely confidante is Sam, half of the lesbian couple across the street. Thrown together through their kindergarten-age sons, Sam and her younger lover Gloria left their husbands for each other, but their passionate relationship has been disintegrating since the ex-husbands sued successfully for custody of the boys. By the day of the fire, Diana has given birth to baby Zoë and rejected both Allison’s pressure to put Zoë up for adoption and Kevin’s marriage proposal. When the evacuation order comes, Allison leaves the house—and her marriage—assuming Joe will come home to get his daughter and granddaughter. But Sam is the one who finds Zoë alone in Diana’s bedroom. Diana’s disappearance exposes open wounds among all the families whose lives she touched.
Suburban noir—dark, funny and sometimes creepy; readers may be surprised at the amount of empathy they end up feeling for less-than-appealing characters.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46386-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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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