A delicate touch throughout, but the characters, for all their foibles, are largely wretched, racked, inscrutable souls next...
Ex–New Yorker staffer Allen (The Green Suit, stories, 2000) offers an eloquent but determinedly downbeat first novel about the family and clerk of a recently deceased Kentucky judge, all at sea about what to do with themselves.
It’s easy for Judge Dupree: he gave his liberal opinions from the bench (confounding those who expected otherwise from the dyed-in-the-wool Republican), defended his harping, health-food freak of a spouse against their two sons, had a glimmer of the life that might have been when he finally kissed his longtime clerk, Lucy, at age 80—and then died. Lucy, though, with no plans for her future, goes to church in hopes of finding a direction. There, she finds Morgan Dupree, the Judge’s divorced younger son, a sometime sportswriter who has come back to Louisville from Manhattan to write a book about his father. The other son, Crawford, still suffering the consequences of landing on his head in a Manhattan street after colliding with a bicyclist, has grown diffident in his teaching and so estranged from his wife in Wisconsin that she starts an affair, while he tries to take up with his son’s much-younger ventriloquist teacher. The Judge’s widow, meanwhile, fusses and frets in her own way, but finds a reliable companion in her yardman, who buries the Judge’s old dog for her when the pooch goes into convulsions and dies on the patio. Part of the mix too is “Uncle” Louis, the Judge’s cousin and best friend, an alcoholic and closet homosexual who finally comes out by bringing home dark-eyed Lazaro from a trip to Guatemala, then succumbs to cancer not long after. As Morgan pursues Lucy, and Crawford travels with the ventriloquist, the Judge, an unabashed train enthusiast, rides the rails as a ghost, occasionally appearing to his loved ones in their distress.
A delicate touch throughout, but the characters, for all their foibles, are largely wretched, racked, inscrutable souls next to whom the ghostly Judge seems a paragon of substance.Pub Date: April 11, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-369-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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