More politics than novel. A movie version could be more interesting than the print.
A political drama set against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam project in China.
Why Hong (K: The Art of Love, 2002, etc.) would choose to fight the damming of the Yangtze River and its resultant environmental damage by writing a novel is a question that arises from a reading of this one. Why she would provide an autobiographical preface explaining her own involvement with the Three Gorges region, then an afterword outlining the Chinese legend on which her book is based, is another. As a stylist, Hong is no W.G. Sebald, and when she creates situations that have environmental innuendos—a scene that takes place in a laboratory, for example, while a sandstorm rages outside—she telegraphs them as meaningful details, explorations of natural power to be controlled, and reflections of her characters’ internal sensibilities. The story focuses on genetic engineer Liu, whose husband, Li, is the director of the dam project (they have in common that both seek to manipulate nature). When Li, a busy, moveable target, uncharacteristically has a pretty underling deliver a large bottle of perfume to Liu, Liu becomes suspicious and sets out to track him down. In the process, she takes a trip back to the region of her youth, where she learns about the corrupt world of the previous generation, including her father’s involvement with the discrediting of his own friends, and perhaps her husband’s lethal corruption. There, she meets Yueming, poor artist son of her mother’s former best friend, who was born on the same day as Liu herself and who organizes protests against the high-handed treatment of peasants forced to vacate their land because of the dam project. In the end, the two approximate the legendary attempted escape of a prostitute and a monk who were executed solely to satisfy the personal ambition of Liu and Yueming’s fathers, 50 years before.
More politics than novel. A movie version could be more interesting than the print.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7145-3100-6
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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