This slim fictional collection of letters from, to, and about a disturbed 12-year-old boy reads more like a writing-class assignment than a debut novel. At the start, Benjamin is heading to summer camp in New Hampshire, and the first section contains letters from his parents, his psychiatrist, the owners of the camp, his counselor, and a few other bits. Little of this rings true: How many summer camps would be willing to take on a child who is frequently seen ``rocking back and forth, playing intensely with the dirt, laughing when he was alone''? A child whose psychiatrist describes him as borderline autistic, clinically depressed, and often unable to function normally? Benjamin is unnaturally attached to a stuffed letter ``H,'' which he calls Elliot and with which his parents abscond after visiting him halfway through the summer. The second section consists of letters from Benjamin to Elliot and vice versa (obviously written by Benjamin). The boy's early letters make it clear that he believes there is an entire society of Elliots living in a place known as Elliottown, but additional correspondence merely repeats that idea without sufficiently expanding on it. Shepard does a good job of re-creating Benjamin's secret language (for example, these letters have a complicated dating system), but she too often hits the reader over the head with Benjamin's obsessions, such as Star Trek and pizza bagels. In fact, much of the material here is obvious, and the differences in the voices of various characters feel forced (Benjamin's counselor writes to a friend in laughable slang, addressing him as ``you studly tan animal''). A third and final section presents correspondence relating to Benjamin's stay in a mental hospital. A lot of fancy fonts and letterheads indicate the different writers (Benjamin's young sister uses a blocky mix of capital and lower-case), but the image of Benjamin himself remains vague. The impulse to utilize an innovative form is admirable, but the results are unfortunately shoddy.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85927-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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