The title is the second-best thing about this extremely uneven anthology of 20 stories written between 1985 and 1993. The best is ``The Brothers Shu,'' by Su Tong (the acclaimed Raise the Red Lantern, 1993), a preternaturally vivid vision of family unhappiness and hatred that blend together sexual torment, homicidal sibling rivalry, shape-shifting, and an aborted love suicide into a fiercely comic Dostoyevskian stew that fairly spews vitriol off the page. It's a defiant, and welcome, corrective to the collection's overall imaginative blandness. As editor and translator Goldblatt points out in his introduction, a moral and aesthetic backlash is evident in much of the literary expression that has followed the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The work gathered here includes realistic tales of family and village conflict (Li Xiao's ``Grass on the Rooftop,'' Mo Yan's ``The Cure''), concentrated studies of erotic fixation (Li Rui's ``Sham Marriage,'' Ai Bei's ``Green Earth Mother''), and accounts of psychological enigma or disturbance frequently poised between reality and nightmare (Yu Hua's ``The Past and the Punishments,'' Duo Duo's ``The Day I Got to Xi'an,'' and Chen Cun's provocative ``Footsteps on the Roof''). But too many of the tales are dominated by ironic reversals and trick endings of the sort already overfamiliar to Western readers; one self-consciously raucous, blackly comic tale (Wang Xiangfu's ``Fritter Hollow Chronicles'') climaxes with a very old and well-known dirty joke. Meanwhile, though, there are other first-rate efforts in addition to Su Tong's: the amusingly masochistic fantasy of Chen Ran's kinky ``Sunshine Between the Lips''; Can Xue's Kafkaesque chronicle of a fugitive murderer's delirious last days, ``The Summons''; and Kong Jiesheng's ambitious detailing of the energies, hostilities, and consequences churned up during an archaeological dig in ``The Sleeping Lion.'' Still, on balance, there's too much dross among the gold.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1573-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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