Another uncompromising fable of brutal oppression and vengeance run riot in a mythical foreign land. The land is carefully unnamed, but it is a place of veldts and kraals, lions and diamond mines, very like Nicol's native South Africa. To it comes a youth schooled in bitterness and revenge ever since his father was arrested and hanged years ago for unspecified crimes. All the youth's encounterswith a treacherous schoolteacher who tries to entice him back to the blessings of civilization; with a community of abusive monks; with a blind gypsy who nurses him; with the pimp Joe Silver and his entourage of ``protÇgÇes''; with the ivory trader Schmidtreinforce the lessons of his greatest teacher, the woodsman Madach: The world is violent and unfair, and no one is to be trusted. All this is set forth in an elemental style aclang with biblical cadences and folktale echoes, and marked by determined understatements and omissions (no dates; practically no proper names or place names; only the sketchiest, most immediate details about psychological motivation) likely to put off readers who aren't already familiar with the conventions of magic realism or Norse sagas. Arriving in ``the south,'' the youth takes the name of Daupus (Death), announces his mission of wholesale vengeance, and recruits a wayward band of mercenaries who start off burdened under the weight of their own betrayals and injusticesa trap in which their fellows were slaughtered and themselves left for deadbut who emerge, through a series of ever more sinister ``contracts,'' as a prophetically amoral force willing to ally themselves with rapists and slaversevery contract leading Daupus and his men closer to a final apocalyptic degradation. Even darker than Nicol's dreamlike earlier parables The Powers That Be (1989) and This Day and Age (1992). In his quest for the archaic power of cultural prophecy, the author seems indifferent to the more mundane task of pleasing his audience.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43766-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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