One respects this earnest tale's passion and indignation, but little else. Johnny is a posturing monster, Laokolé a stoical...
The native Congolese author, now Massachusetts-based, writes of civil war and its attendant atrocities.
Unlike Dongala's subtly woven The Fire of Origins (2002) and Little Boys Come from the Stars (2001), his latest offers a simplistic contrast of innocence with rampant amorality. It’s set in an unnamed West African nation where forces representing the Mayi-Dogo and Dogo-Mayi tribes struggle to annihilate one another, aided by mercenaries from various countries, though the fighting is entrusted largely to laxly trained “militias” whose main “political” objectives are rape and looting. One such force, the Mata-Matas (aka “Roaring Tigers”), flounders under the leadership of strutting thug General Giap, who has inexplicably delegated major responsibilities to the eponymous Johnny, a teenaged brute who assumes several resonant noms de guerre before settling on “Mad Dog,” and who narrates his murderous misadventures in vainglorious accents, all the while assuring us that he’s an unparalleled intellectual, heroic freedom fighter and sexual athlete. Mad Dog’s narrative is juxtaposed with that of Laokolé, a valiant 16-year-old refugee who flees the carnage with her multiple amputee “Mama” and younger brother Fofo. She (a would-be engineer) is the “intellectual” that Johnny claims to be—and it becomes apparent that Dongala is setting the two on a collision course, as Laokolé finds temporary sanctuary in a U.N. embassy building, loses all her loved ones and finally reaches an embattled village, where (in a painfully unconvincing climactic scene) she and Mad Dog face off, lethal violence ensues and, as their country smolders, the stars overhead wheel silently and indifferently in their courses.
One respects this earnest tale's passion and indignation, but little else. Johnny is a posturing monster, Laokolé a stoical saint, and every action and thought of each is reduced to melodramatic cliché. The result is an all-too-credible horror story, but not a good novel.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-17995-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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