Flabby, often implausible plot propelled by original prose.
Four Dubliners regret misguided liaisons with a sadistic Irish politico.
Keyes (Anybody Out There, 2006, etc.) displays her trademark uncanny ability to wring humor from clichés in this story of four women whose paths cross with that of handsome Irish party hack Paddy de Courcy. Lola, whose narration hilariously parodies the article and pronoun-challenged diary of Bridget Jones, learns from the press that Paddy, her boyfriend, is engaged to Alicia, a horsey widow respectable enough to be a political helpmeet. Grace, a Dublin tabloid reporter, and her fraternal twin sister Marnie, met Paddy while all three were students working in a Dublin pub. Grace flirted briefly with Paddy before losing him to Marnie. But as his ambitions escalate, Paddy dumps Marnie, leaving her emotionally shell-shocked. Lola, fashion advisor to Dublin’s nouveau riche matrons, had found Paddy’s sexual proclivities increasingly problematic, but she’s so unsettled by his summary betrayal that she flees to a rustic seaside cabin in County Clare, where she becomes reluctant housemother to a growing contingent of transvestites. A brief fling with a surfer helps her weather Paddy’s rejection, but memories of how his kinky sexuality segued into “isolated” acts of physical abuse undermine her struggle to recover her sense of self-worth. Grace learns that Paddy may be behind the seemingly random torching of her sports car, but withholds her full history with him from the reader. She’s more preoccupied with trying to keep Marnie, who until recently lived happily in London with her commodities trader husband Nick and two daughters, from drinking herself to death. The weight of attention devoted to Marnie’s harrowing alcoholic free-fall deemphasizes and defuses the devastating impact of Paddy’s horrendous behavior. The gradual reveal of Paddy’s monstrosity toward the novels’ women, interspersed with the flip entertainment of Lola’s Bridget Jones-speak, generates a jarring unevenness of tone.
Flabby, often implausible plot propelled by original prose.Pub Date: June 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-112402-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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