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SWALLOWING CLOUDS

Unmotivated sex, even as syrupy as this, is the province of windup toys. And because Ng’s characters are sketched in...

            A young Chinese woman exiled to Australia reenacts the ancient rituals of sex with a married man – with disastrous results – in a first US publication by the Singapore-born Ng.

            Syn, an English student in Sydney, is also the reincarnation of an adulterous Shanghai woman drowned in a pig basket in 1918.  Far from home during the Tiananmen Square massacre, Syn’s show of support for the students there results in the termination of her grant and her rights of citizenship.  Desperate to make ends meet, she takes a job in the butcher shop of Zhu Zhiyee, who quickly enlists her as his concubine.  With pleasure, she agrees to facilitate him sexually (and, in the novel, at length) and emotionally.  Zhu, wealthy from his thriving business, puts her up in the ultimate Luv Hut, a virtual mansion equipped with hooks in the ceiling from which she may dangle, happily bound, while he penetrates her “passage of yin” with his “stiff jade whisk.”  Zhu’s explorations in this area are exhaustive:  smells, tastes, tongues, armpits, and pubic hairs all blend to provoke sexual transcendence.  During an early mopping up, Zhu confides that his young daughter, BaiTien, is autistic and has undergone a hysterectomy.  Then, Zhu’s wife catches on to his extracurricular activities and sees to it that Syn is fired from the shop; BaiTien is relocated to an institution; and Zhu’s “Chinese Sausage” is kept trouser-bound.  Meanwhile, Syn has become pregnant, miscarries, and recalls traditional loyalty to her mother in Shanghai, who refuses to join her daughter in Sydney.  This entire paper-thin story is recalled when Syn visits China in 1994; as her tour-group views the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the Summer Palace, she ponders the eerie parallels between her tale and her country’s history.

            Unmotivated sex, even as syrupy as this, is the province of windup toys.  And because Ng’s characters are sketched in monotone, their fate inspires only mystification.

Pub Date: July 26, 1999

ISBN: 0-88001-644-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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