British author Leroy’s US debut starts strong, creating delicious uncertainty about the heroine, but eventually settles for...
Mother battles the medical establishment when her child comes down with a mysterious illness—in this indictment of the British health care system.
At 13, artistically gifted Catriona Lydgate was abandoned by her alcoholic mother and placed in institutional care. In her 20s, Catriona met Richard, the divorced, debonair father of one of her charges at the preschool where she worked. Now happily middle-class and married to Richard, Catriona is disturbed when she starts receiving beseeching postcards from her mother in Berlin. Around the same time, Catriona’s eight-year-old daughter Daisy comes down with a debilitating stomach flu she can’t seem to shake. The family GP doesn’t take the illness very seriously, clearly considering Catriona an overly protective, hysterical mother. But after Catriona’s repeated prodding, the GP reluctantly refers the child to a pediatrician who also clashes with Catriona. Soon the doctors are proposing that she is at least part of the problem, if not its cause (Munchausen by Proxy is bandied around). At first Richard seems fairly supportive, but when Cat, increasingly angry and defensive, demands that he go along with hiding her bad childhood from the authorities, his understanding falters. Support arrives—of course—in the form of another attractive divorced father, an Irish journalist who has recently moved into the neighborhood. He takes Catriona’s side unquestioningly. As Cat becomes ever more driven, Leroy gives her daily life a lurking undertone of menace that adds an element of psychological mystery. Although Catriona is eventually vindicated, for long stretches she is no clear-cut heroine, but a woman still in the thrall of early demons; we can understand why Richard (who is too easily discounted as a philanderer) and the doctors would suspect her tendencies toward paranoia and obsessiveness.
British author Leroy’s US debut starts strong, creating delicious uncertainty about the heroine, but eventually settles for pat answers and easy romance.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-73813-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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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