A somewhat clichÇd approach to storytelling—a retirement home resident relates her life story—offers mixed results, thanks in part to a huge gap left in the narrative. Octogenarian Viola Bagg finds herself underwater when the Cessna she's in dives into a pond, trapping her in an air bubble created by the windshield. As water slowly seeps in and her oxygen diminishes, Viola relives the events of her life. Though born on Wallawalhalla, a tropical island in the East Indian Ocean, the infant Viola was carted back home to Ontario, Canada, after her mother's mysterious death. There, she endures a dull childhood under the care of her reserved father until, years later, she returns to Wallawalhalla as a young woman to offer secretarial support to an archaeological dig. But what with the island's eccentric colonial inhabitants (including the elderly Miss Bartram, who believes Viola's mother was kidnapped and made empress of the white ants) and the kind of scandalous behavior that wouldn't wash in Canada, more is eventually buried than dug up. Viola and best friend Jenny are living with Jenny's Uncle Roddy, the dig's photographer, and his vacant wife Emma, who suffers from mysterious bruises and black eyes. After an unfortunate turn of events, Uncle Roddy is thrown from a cliff. Ever after, Viola leads a cautious life, hoping to avoid the kind of murderous excitement she experienced that Wallawalhalla summer. She marries Harry Bagg, an archaeologist. They travel the globe, have a daughter, and divorce. The next 50-odd years are skipped (to the detriment of the narrative), and we pick up with a now-aged Viola at long last striking out independently, throwing caution to the wind with an aviator boyfriend and a whole new identity, which may or may not survive the crash. Despite its breach in continuity, Anderson's first fiction nevertheless offers a likable assemblage of characters—and we do end up caring about Viola's fate.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-571-19884-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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