At 500-plus pages, more panorama then drama.
Sequel to the much darker Crazy Ladies (1990), West’s fourth is a marathon romp through Southern froth.
After leaping from the roof of husband Albert’s dime-store, Dorothy Hamilton McDougal weathers confinement in an asylum and electroshock by corresponding with First Ladies. Daughter Bitsy clobbers husband Claude with a package of frozen baby backribs (he tried to drown her in a slow-draining sink), then flees to the Gulf Coast with baby Jennifer. Dorothy’s sister, Clancy Jane, holds down the ancestral abode at 214 Dixie in Crystal Falls, Tenn. A former hippie, Clancy is married to physician Byron. Next door in Dorothy’s brick house, son Mack, a Vietnam vet and amputee, lives in redneck bliss with Earlene. From 1972 to 1994, the Hamilton/MacDougal women strive in vain to escape their collective destiny: bumbling and/or skirt-chasing men. Parental favoritism and sibling distrust, traceable to redoubtable ancestor Miss Gussie, continue. Robbed of custody by Claude’s snooty family, Bitsy nevertheless becomes an off-and-on babysitter for Jennifer. Dorothy returns from the funny farm with shocked-white hair and eyebrows singed bare. Albert has divorced her and married a cashier from the store. Clancy starts a gourmet café, then moves to a remote mountain house. She replaces Byron, driven off by her Buddhist scorched-earth school of interior décor, with proliferating cats. Along the way, her daughter, Violet, becomes a psychiatrist and enjoys the story’s only stable marriage. After an aborted engagement to a dentist, whose flagrantly awful family mires him forever, Bitsy acquires polish as the wife of New Orleans star cardiologist Louie. But his incorrigible yen for nubile nurses eventually compels her to flee to London, where she finally finds a trustworthy male. A wedding scene, in which Jennifer narrowly misses succumbing to the Wentworth syndrome of enabling ne’er-do-well husbands, brings the bloodlines and plotlines together in clichéd celebration of family craziness.
At 500-plus pages, more panorama then drama.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-018406-X
Page Count: 544
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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