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IMPERFECT PAIRINGS

A pleasant read, rich in cultural ethos, but with little character depth.

Townsend’s (Reel Life, 2012) second novel presents a portrait of two clashing cultures, embodied in the relationship between a career-minded American woman and a conflicted Italian man.

The novel depicts the tried-and-true themes of the New versus Old World, and pragmatism versus romance, through its main characters: Jamie, a driven woman who has found success in a man’s world, and Jack, her Italian lover who is torn between his American business and his family’s legacy. Jamie is a child of divorce, dogmatically anti-marriage and single-minded in her professional quest. Jack’s character is more interesting: Pressured to achieve success in America, he’s a beacon of hope for his bankrupt, haunted Italian family. However, his heart is in the old Italian ways, and he can’t escape his attachment to his family’s antiquated wine business. The opening chapters are set in Italy, where Jack brings Jamie as his date to his brother’s wedding; from the beginning, readers get a visceral look at Jack’s struggle to reconcile his feelings for his family with his life in America. The flowing prose is polished, but too easily glosses over moments that could offer more emotional heft. For example, readers experience Jamie’s attraction to Jack, but never his attraction to her, thus obscuring one of the driving forces of Jack’s character: his love for Jamie. Indeed, the third-person narration stays very close to Jamie throughout, but never reveals as much about her thoughts some readers might expect. Jamie is so emotionally blocked that without objective insight into her inner conflict readers may find her one-dimensional and unsympathetic.

A pleasant read, rich in cultural ethos, but with little character depth.

Pub Date: May 17, 2013

ISBN: 978-0983791522

Page Count: 387

Publisher: Ripetta Press

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2013

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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