Sharp observations don’t count for much beside such an unappealing protagonist.
The small world of Oliver Tate is detailed in this limp first novel by a young Welshman.
Oliver is almost 15, the only child of middle-class parents in Swansea, South Wales, and a self-absorbed smartass. His best friend is Chips, the school bully; he and Oliver make life such hell for a fat girl called Zoe that she’s forced to transfer. On a family vacation in Tuscany, he’s too busy tricking his father into rescuing him from a mock drowning to notice he’s in a foreign country. The story he narrates is sprinkled with diary entries and e-mails; brand names lend it a spurious reality. The first time he has sex it’s with his girlfriend Jordana in his parents’ bed. (The bed could use the action; the marriage of Oliver’s parents is going through a rough patch, and they haven’t had sex in months.) Oliver’s mother Jill goes to a meditation retreat run by an old friend, Graham, a New Age type who Oliver believes is bent on seducing her. He follows her there, planning an “intervention,” but comes off looking like a self-dramatizing jerk, in contrast to the calm, long-suffering adults. (This episode, and its later ramifications, are what you get to chew on in lieu of a plot.) He doesn’t manage any better with Jordana, whose mother is having an operation for a brain tumor. Jordana has become newly sensitive to those around her, a sensitivity Oliver has no use for; he ignores her in her hour of need, so naturally she dumps him. Then Zoe shows up, more attractive and many pounds lighter, and devises an ingenious payback. Poor Oliver; it’s just not fair. Is suicide the answer? He ends his story with a grandiose vision of his corpse being plucked from the ocean; the shot is all over the Internet and CNN. Any coming-of-age moment is still a long way off.
Sharp observations don’t count for much beside such an unappealing protagonist.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6683-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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