The author nicely inhabits her three main characters but rarely risks escalating the tensions among them.
Fan Wu (February Flowers, 2007) portrays two sisters on divergent life paths earnestly seeking common ground after their mother arrives in San Francisco from China.
Mary Chang lives comfortably in Silicon Valley, though she suffers the abuse of her harridan boss at a tech firm, and her husband works exceedingly long hours at a pre-IPO startup. (It’s 2000, and the dot-com boom is just going bust.) Her younger sister Ingrid struggles to make ends meet in New York as a translator and tour guide for Chinese visitors while trying to launch a career as a fiction writer. Mary feels Ingrid is flighty and doesn’t respect the financial support she gave when Ingrid left China for the United States as a college student; Ingrid thinks Mary is too settled and tried to force her sister’s career path. To help reconcile this tiff comes their mother, Wang Fenglan, whose arrival from China inspires Ingrid to move to San Francisco. That brings mother and daughters geographically and emotionally closer, but not in any especially compelling fashion. The book’s stiff structure and prose make it feel like an assemblage of set pieces in which each character advances by half-measures: Mary nearly has an affair with an old friend from China; Ingrid has a promising coffee date with a literary agent; Wang gets used to her new American neighborhood and enjoys spending time with Mary’s son. To liven up these modest incidents, Fan Wu has her characters look back. Wang recalls the violence of the Cultural Revolution, while Ingrid remembers her experiences during the Tiananmen Square protests. Some of those recollections are vividly turned, but the present-day story feels threadbare. It’s also quite nearly plotless; what seems to be a bombshell revelation about the family, introduced about halfway through, is largely neglected.
The author nicely inhabits her three main characters but rarely risks escalating the tensions among them.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9889-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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
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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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