An affecting portrait of an artistically gifted family.
DeAngelo’s (Germs on Our Mind, 2005) debut historical novel follows the tempestuous life of a brilliant Italian musician.
Forlorn after his wife dies during childbirth, Antonio Satriano decides to temporarily leave his five children in Italy with relatives and start a new life in 1882 America. A music professor and a composer, he lands in New York City with the intention of finding work and sending for his kids after three years. Meanwhile, his son, Pietro, establishes a reputation for himself as a virtuosic cornet player back in Italy and is awarded a professorship at Milan’s Royal Academy of Music. He soon leaves behind a promising career to meet his father in Kansas City, Missouri. Pietro does achieve considerable recognition for his musical prowess, but he repeatedly tarnishes his celebrity with public scandal: his first marriage quickly ends in divorce, and his second is to a mentally unstable 15-year-old. That relationship also ends—but only after Pietro finds himself in jail as a result of a raucous domestic dispute and is humiliated in open court. He weds a third time but later crashes an automobile while chauffeuring his mistress about town. Pietro is also preoccupied with vigilantly responding to his father’s growing alcoholism. Antonio’s problem becomes so ungovernable that his sons are reduced to burying his instruments so he can’t pawn them to buy more gin. DeAngelo tells the family’s story from multiple first-person perspectives: Pietro’s; his third wife, Musa’s; and Antonio’s. She clearly has a deep affection for her characters—Antonio and Pietro are representations of her real-life great-great-grandfather and great-great-uncle, respectively—and she draws them sympathetically. At the same time, she never shies away from presenting an unvarnished depiction of their foibles. Also, she provides an illuminating window into the venomous prejudices that Italian immigrants faced in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Overall, it’s a touching, often comic tale of cultural identity, passion, and artistic inspiration.
An affecting portrait of an artistically gifted family.Pub Date: June 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-71663-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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