Family history and feminist themes combine in an earnest but strained debut—about women's struggle for selfhood at the turn of the century. Set in what is today the Adirondacks Park but was then a mining camp, Perks's tale traces the evolving if unlikely friendship between two women: One the rich but seizure-prone Regina Sartwell, her life loosely based on that of the author's own great- great-aunt; the other Olive Honsinger, a miner's wife and daughter. The pair meet when Regina, visiting the camp with her stereotypically mine-owning Victorian uncle, throws herself from a window before a crowd that happens to include Olive. Regina survives, but her epileptic fits, diagnosed as hysteria and incipient madness, have tried the family long enough. Her doctor has given her six months to shape up before she's sent to an asylum where radical genital surgery will be performed. Meanwhile, Regina, attracted by Olive's golden hair, insists that her new friend take care of her while she recovers from her fall. Olive does so because her family needs the money, but the job isn't easy. She not only has to deal with the capricious Regina, who becomes pregnant after seducing Olive's Swedish brother-in-law, then has an abortion that gets her into even more trouble, but she also—like the reader—has to contend with the novel's long political agenda: so that, as Regina and Olive's friendship grows, the two encounter despised gypsies, striking miners, female herbalists, prejudiced male doctors, asylums, a breakaway Shaker colony, and the implications of romantic friendship between women. Regina finally finds peace- -and refuge from her cruel family—with the Shaker women, while also making new lives possible for Olive and her family by means of a gift. Perks tries hard to break new ground, and yet her first novel, like a literary beast of burden, is overloaded with good intentions.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14065-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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