Eleven more spare, elegant stories from French-Canadian author Gallant (In Transit, 1989, etc.), ten of which first appeared in The New Yorker. Interconnected vignettes of the family Carette form the first four stories. In ``1933,'' a newly widowed but stalwart Mme. Carette is forced to move with her young daughters Berthe and Marie to a smaller apartment in a seedy street in Montreal. Sixteen years later, in ``The Chosen Husband,'' a still resolute Mme. Carette arranges a marriage for her feeble-witted younger child Marie. By the 60's, in ``From Cloud to Cloud,'' Marie's husband has died and Marie must move in with older sister Berthe; meanwhile, Marie's 18- year-old son Raymond steals the family Volkswagen and flees to the US and Vietnam. ``Florida'' recounts his subsequent spotty career in the motel trade. Other stories are divided between Montreal and Paris, where Gallant has lived since the 1950's. In ``Dede,'' an upper-class Parisian schoolboy is braced by a visit from his black- sheep uncle. In the lengthy title story, a feisty French-Italian girl almost succeeds in overturning her mother's plan that she marry Arnaud Pons, son of Parisian family friends—until she discovers that marrying Arnaud is exactly what will make her happy. In ``Forain'' and the lovely ``A State of Affairs,'' Gallant touchingly follows the now circumscribed lives of a handful of elderly Central European refugees in Paris. And in the final, brilliant ``The Fenton Child,'' she returns to Montreal, where a proper Irish Catholic girl—with a charming ward-heeler for a father—aids in what she comes to realize is an illegal adoption arranged for an ``English'' family in the district. In each of these pieces and others, the details are all: shades of meaning turn on the condition of the furnishings and the color of the light. Another fine collection from Gallant.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42213-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
