Cambor's first outing is an old-fashioned, frequently moving, always sweepingly readable tale of one family's long-extended suffering, decline, and final qualified hope. Born early this century in Pittsburgh of rigidly German-Catholic immigrant parents, Edmund Mueller rebels by becoming a fireman instead of following his cabinet-maker father, then by choosing to marry a flighty girl named Fanny, who wants more than anything to become a dancer. The couple have a boy named Paul, then a girl named Anne, neither of whom Fanny shows a natural desire to care for—and in fact when her daughter is a year or so old, Fanny abandons the brood for a life on the road, dropping in unexpectedly now and again, then relying on postcards, those also soon trickling away. Its heart thus torn out, the family that's left behind begins its long, tortured effort to stay alive. While Edmund throws himself into his firefighting, Paul grows inward, and finally leaves home to join the Dominicans, eventually becoming a priest sent off to distant parts of the world. As for Anne, the minute she finishes ``Catholic school'' she's off to college, and after that medical school, leaving Edmund in the empty old house alone- -where he grows steadily more eccentric, then neurotic, then psychotic, reading books on astrology and alchemy, finally transforming his basement into an alchemist's lab where he spends years trying to distill the magical substance (the Philosopher's Stone) that will bring back happiness and the past. Only after Anne has become a doctor (with a son of her own) will the family be reunited and Edmund rescued from his madness, although even then only amid tragedy intensified and renewed. The publishers mention Cambor's having studied writing with Donald Barthelme, and perhaps that great innovator stirs in his rest as his student flowers forth, with deserved if ironic success, into the fictional not-new.
Pub Date: June 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-11550-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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