A well-honed work on surviving heartache, spiffed up by the shiny glow of Tinseltown.
Garnished with the glamour of Hollywood, this third novel from actress Kagan (Somebody’s Baby, 1998, etc.) transforms potentially hackneyed fare into a genuine exploration of grief.
The complex mother-daughter bond serves as the theme linking the randomly intertwined lives of three women. Chassi Jennings is a Hollywood star literally born to the role: her mother, Sally, was a three-time Academy Award winner; her father, Saul, headed a production company. When Chassi was 12, mother and daughter went on a girls-only vacation to Rome, where larger-than-life Sally was hit by a car and killed. Fourteen years later, Chassi is sent to Dr. Eleanor Costello to work out the cause of her `spells,` linked to that half-remembered day. For Eleanor, the therapy sessions are strangely cathartic. Her own daughter, Caroline, is Chassi's age, but they haven't spoken since the sudden death of Eleanor's husband. The lovable Jimmy was the glue holding the two together, but Eleanor wanted him all to herself, and now Caroline's last words (`Don't call me, Mom`) ring in her ears as a constant reminder of her failings as a mother. Near Eleanor's office is a cafe where Chassi stares at the wall before sessions and where beautiful, driven Ioni St. John pours lattes while dreaming of movie stardom. Though Kagan throws in all the ingredients of a soapy melodrama à la Valley of the Dolls, she gracefully avoids the predictable by creating complex people whose sad, stoic anguish resonates beyond the fashionable setting. As Chassi comes closer to discovering the truth about her mother's death while preparing to reprise Sally's most famous film role, Eleanor daydreams of Jimmy and makes tentative steps to reconcile with her daughter. Meanwhile, Ioni, with much advice from her strong-headed mother in Texas, climbs her way to the top.
A well-honed work on surviving heartache, spiffed up by the shiny glow of Tinseltown.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-15746-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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