Another winner from the author of, most recently, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (Feb. 2003).
Buchan again agreeably celebrates a middle-aged woman’s use of guile and smartness to score subtle points and victories in taking back her life from a demanding husband.
Though Fanny Savage loves Will, the truth is that ever since they married—they even had to cut short their honeymoon because a sudden election was called—she’s had to be the loyal political wife: the wife who never knows when he’ll be home, who is unable to have her own life because she must be supportive, attend local events, and put up with the aides who virtually live in her house. Will is now a cabinet minister in the British Parliament, dreaming of even higher office and relying on Fanny’s unswerving loyalty. Chloe, their only child, is about to graduate from high school, and Fanny realizes that time is passing and that she needs something more in her life than family and politics. She’s also tired of coping with Will’s alcoholic and divorced sister Meg, who lives with them. Meg is there because she raised Will after their parents died young, but she is opinionated, intrusive, and frequently unreliable. Fanny used to help her own Italian-born father run his wine business, but marriage to Will ended that. Now, feeling restless and resentful, she decides to make some changes—but then her father suddenly dies. Distraught and needing time alone, she takes his ashes back to the Italian village of his birth. There, finding peace and a sense of belonging, she’s not only tempted to stay but to have an affair with an old lover, now back in her life. As she ponders what to do, life suddenly gets tough for Will when Meg dies in a drunken fall; he loses an election; and he fears that Fanny won’t come back. But Fanny, realizing that she still loves Will, knows how to use his vulnerabilities to gain some advantages of her own.
Another winner from the author of, most recently, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (Feb. 2003).Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03280-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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