A poignant exploration of the complicated dynamic of fathers and sons.
In Cooper’s (Smooth in Meetings, 2014, etc.) novel, an unemployed, middle-aged man with a possible drinking problem must persuade his nonagenarian father to give up driving.
Wriston Wayne, the retired chairman of the Boreal Bancorporation, lives in Florida with his second wife, Cindy. Charlie, his 50-something middle son and a real estate expert, has been unexpectedly laid off from TBF Bank in New York City. While he and his wife, Jane, are visiting Wriston and Cindy, the older man loses control of his Cadillac in the parking garage of their condo building. Charlie fears that a serious accident could be in Wriston’s future, but running errands in the car is one of the few deep pleasures that the old man has left. The dynamic between the father and son is thrown into stark relief: Wriston loves Charlie, but he’s disappointed that he didn’t make it to the top of the heap in his chosen field (“Charlie never emerged from the pack,” he reflects). Charlie, meanwhile, agonizes over whether to stop Wriston from driving, but it’s taken out of his hands when the elderly man’s health declines precipitously in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, Charlie’s late-night wine drinking persists. The focus and interiority of this novel are truly wonderful, and Cooper takes his time exploring what goes through his characters’ minds—principally Charlie’s, but also Wriston’s as he carefully navigates his beloved Caddy from his home to the Publix supermarket. Cooper has the old man note every turn and every lane change; it should be maddeningly boring, but instead, it gives readers a painful appreciation of a person who knows that he must be careful because his freedom is so tenuous. Interestingly, readers later get the same view of Charlie running errands himself as he wrestles with painful issues regarding his dad.
A poignant exploration of the complicated dynamic of fathers and sons.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5123-8409-3
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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