Four aging, gay male friends reunite over a Thanksgiving holiday, unearthing hidden pasts and a smoldering tragedy in Currier’s (A Gathering Storm, 2014, etc.) novel.
The author’s storytelling gifts are on full display in this tale of melodramatic entanglements between a quartet of 40-something friends as they spend a holiday reminiscing at a bucolic North Carolina mountain cabin. The country setting seems to be just what Scott and his younger partner, Aiden, need, and hosts Tom and Harley welcome them with lively conversation about coming out, old boyfriends, their past lives as college students in the big city, the downsides of aging, and their separate attempts to make peace with the loss of close friends from AIDS (the “ghostly baggage strapped to our backs”). Tom, the book’s narrator, shares his personal story of living through the bleak mid-1980s in New York City as a struggling writer, and of his longtime friendship with Scott, whom he met as a postgrad and dated. They “became better friends than lovers, kindred expatriates of unaccepting Southern families.” Things begin to get dicey when a mutual friend named Neal, a pal from Tom’s college days, is mentioned by Aiden, Scott’s lover and a die-hard Southern California urban dweller with “a clear sense of drama.” The talk reveals Neal’s abusive relationship with Aiden’s nephew Perry, which leads to a vicious plot involving obsession and murder-suicide. The violent, unsettling truth forces Tom to begin writing again and fully embrace the love he feels for Harley. Thankfully, Currier’s slim, satisfying novel isn’t overwritten or mired in exposition. Instead, it gets to the heart of the quartet’s issues quickly, creating a swift, dramatic read with plenty of poignancy regarding the plight of gay men in the age of AIDS. Fans of interpersonal dramatics will find much to savor in Currier’s deceptively simple narrative as intimate histories and close friendships mingle with explosive results. No one emerges from the mountain cabin unscathed.
An involving, sentimental yarn of love, secrets, and relationships.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937627-04-1
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Chelsea Station Editions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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