British writer Hucker's becoming a master at exploring the psyche of the independent-minded woman (A Dangerous Happiness, 1996, etc.)—and her examination here of the complex nature of female friendships produces yet another angle on the subject. Middle-aged, red-haired Polly Ferrison's friends think that she has the perfect life: two bright, attractive daughters, a challenging, satisfying job as a high-school history teacher, and a loving husband, Neville. But as it turns out, of course, appearances lie: Neville is actually a selfish, demanding, greedy, adulterous creep who's been conducting a sporadic 20-year fling with one of Polly's supposed best friends, Vanessa. Worse, he's in love with another woman (now pregnant by him), whom he wants to marry. A breakup with Polly is inevitable. When her four best friends from college—the vampy Vanessa, wealthy Candida, farmwife Mary, and career-woman Jane—hear the news, they're sympathetic (except for Vanessa, who's enraged that Neville hasn't chosen her), but they've all got troubles of their own: Candida married for money and is now in love with another man; Mary has a husband and children of her own, but Vanessa relies on her so much that it's almost as if she has another extra-needy charge. And driven Jane has finally met the man of her dreams, but she'll have to give up her career and move to Poland if she wants to stay together with him. At the story's opening, the surfaces of these women's lives haven't yet cracked, but circumstances soon plunge all four into a turmoil that teaches them, to varying degrees, that sometimes friendship is the only thing you can count on. The larger point, however, is that the modern woman has enough options, so that any choices she makes can be the right ones—if she believes in her own self-worth. A slight but ultimately satisfying read, less syrupy than much of this genre.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-17051-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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
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