First fiction endangered by a life-threatening case of exposition.
Old murder haunts a rural Georgia community, in a debut from TV writer and soap actress Shaffer.
Some think the three Margarets know what happened—but the old ladies said all they had to say a long time ago. A New York journalist working on a book about the world-famous scientist Vashti Johnson, who grew up in Charles Valley, picks up Laurel McReady, a major-haired divorcée with a big mouth, at a bar and gets her to explain. She starts with the story of L’il Bit (a.k.a. Margaret Elizabeth), the hopelessly plain, too-tall, galumphing daughter of Harrison Banning III, whose radical politics and NAACP membership scandalized everyone in town. Then there’s Dr. Maggie, an in-the-closet lesbian, whose do-gooding knows no color. (Maggie’s childhood friend Lottie was black, and Maggie never got over her guilt about getting a fine education when Lottie couldn’t.) These two befriended the much-younger Peggy, a white-trash goddess, after she was raped by Grady Garrison, a brute whose rich parents always indulged him. Later, she married Grady’s father, old Dalton Garrison, who never knew about the rape until years after their May-December union. Moving right along, Laurel explains that her ne’er-do-well father died mysteriously on the same night as Richard Johnson, who married Lottie’s daughter Nella. Richard Johnson, black and proud in a way that got white folks riled, was run over after an altercation with Grady, apparently over the favors of sweet but stupid Nella, who left town with her own daughter, Vashti, shortly thereafter. The three Margarets saw to Vashti’s education, and the smart little girl grew up to become a brilliant scientist. But she came back home, dying of brain cancer, to commit suicide, and it’s been whispered that the three Margarets were there when she did. Eventually, Laurel gets out the whole story of the three old ladies, in mind-boggling detail.
First fiction endangered by a life-threatening case of exposition.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50852-X
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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