You would have to be deaf to miss the John Millington Synge in Cady’s twanging, Twain-like tall tale. But you can always...
Uncivil actions at the Hood Canal find an immortal entity dragging cars into the Puget Sound sluice’s wide and dismal depths.
Cady goes phantasmological again, as in Inagehi (1994), which bodied forth the Native American myth of part-human/part-spirit Nunnehi. But the author of The American Writer: Shaping a Nation’s Mind (1999) not only likes to get at the spirit of a region and go for the mytho-cosmic, he also admires giving a good Irish jig to his sentence and each word its winsome whirl in the moonlight. So when a young wreck hauler comes into Bertha’s Beer and Bait, home of pool hustlers, and speaks of the car he’s just hauled out of Hood Canal with a guy and a lady in it, he must say fancifully, “A hell of a thing to do to a Buick.” And then this playboy of the Puget Sound adds, “A’ course it’s busted up a little.” After the pining blacksmith Sugar Bear hammers a hole into the head of an unwholesome man for his nasty remark about virginal young witch Green Annie, he sinks the body deep into Hood Canal, car and all. The lovelorn young witch then makes up wild tales to distract the cops from thinking about the missing man and invents a car-crushingly oversensitive Water Fury that twists Studebakers into love knots. When low rainfall shrinks the canal, the dunked car is exposed but the body is gone. Then the tow-truck kid loses his Ranchero to the Stinking Thing, and a babbling canal fisherman sees the Creature hover and gangle below him like something out of Lovecraft.
You would have to be deaf to miss the John Millington Synge in Cady’s twanging, Twain-like tall tale. But you can always depend on Cady for a full-blooded monster and a big damn contest between good and evil. It’s that Pacific Northwest darkness coursing in his veins, whatever the comedy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28079-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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