A grim, rather airless portrait of a loner spiraling through anger, obsession, and increasingly violent fantasies toward destruction. Taylor’s debut, set in Britain’s perpetually depressed North, follows the half-hearted efforts of Errol Oldfield to elude the furies that seem to be hounding him. Unschooled but bright, energetic but without ambition, he exerts real effort only in pursuit of his various fetishes—including the accumulation of handkerchiefs lifted from the women he fancies. At the moment his interest is focused on Maxine, a co-worker at the Thrifty Miss Betsy discount- shop. A divorcÇe, Maxine is happy to play Errol along, repeatedly seeming to offer and then retract some sort of intimacy. And Errol, for reasons never fully made clear, haplessly goes on hoping and longing. Interspersed with the scenes of Errol’s strangulated courtship are some bleak if perfectly etched ones of life among the down-and-out crowd that Errol moves among; hustlers, petty crooks, the walking wounded, all are featured in a number of boozy scenes in which the possibility of violence always hovers on the margins. Errol himself is given to indulging in violent fantasies, many having to do with his prissy, disapproving, tart-tongued flatmate, Bernard. Another matter never fully explored is just why Bernard, fastidious and self-satisifed as he is, is attracted to the messy, sullen, confused Errol. Cruelty continually rearranges these lives: relationships turn abusive or are casually abandoned, friends betray one another, sex is often a substitute for connection. Taylor, in his fascination with the mind of an obsessive personality, and in his unblinking view of fetid flats, shabby pubs, and aimless, damaged working-class lives, clearly has much in common with writers such as Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, but unlike them he has not yet found a language, or a vision, that transforms his material. Errol remains a figure more puzz1ing than moving, and the grisly climax is unsurprising. Taylor has vigor, and a sharp eye for detail, but his first fiction lacks sufficient depth to be truly memorable.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1999
ISBN: 1-85242-593-8
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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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