An American coming-of-age tale told with warmth and humor.
In Bancroft’s debut novel, a Boy Scout becomes a man in a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1960s.
Isaac Yardley is a straight-laced teenager whose eccentric father, Rockwell “Speedy” Yardley, obsessively quotes Moby-Dick. In the summer of 1968, Speedy begins a social experiment that quickly becomes a ritual for father and son: when they see someone flick a cigarette from a car, they attempt to discern why the person littered rather than leave the butt in the car’s ashtray. To do so, they tail the cars to gas stations, accost drivers at stoplights, and even tag vehicles with bumper stickers that read “I Flick Butts.” This quirky project serves as the structural backbone of the novel, as each chapter follows a different car and cigarette-thrower. More importantly, though, the project leads Isaac to self-discovery and new relationships, including his first love with Juliana Madison, a girl from his high school; and a strange friendship with Vic Martine, a mysterious, wealthy investor. Although Isaac’s summer-love story is far from original, Bancroft depicts the relationship with authentic warmth. Vic, on the other hand, proves to be a more engaging character. He ostensibly moves to town to work on a real estate development project, but he soon takes a curious interest in Isaac and ultimately becomes an active mentor; the uncertainty surrounding his motivations makes for the novel’s most compelling drama. Meanwhile, Isaac and Speedy continue their “crusade for the truth about butt-flickers” as they spout lines from Herman Melville’s classic work to the point of distraction. The drama is well-paced until about two-thirds of the way through the novel, when a sudden tragedy catalyzes an abrupt shift; the story then jumps from 1968 to 2002 to show Isaac tracking cigarette-throwers with his own son. Bancroft struggles with this leap, and several plotlines are left incomplete or unsatisfying. Nonetheless, Isaac and his father are charming enough characters to engage readers; Isaac, in particular—a slightly overage Boy Scout with conservative, suburban tastes—offers a refreshingly different window into the culture of 1968. Fans of bildungsromans and vintage Americana will be pleased.
An American coming-of-age tale told with warmth and humor.Pub Date: June 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9974350-0-9
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Ecphora Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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