With a bestselling debut (Anywhere But Here, 1987) followed by a shaky sequel (The Lost Father, 1991), Simpson has a lot riding on her latest effort—which proves to be a challenging but less-than- riveting saga of a girl who finally meets her larger-than-life father but has difficulty getting his attention. Themes from the other novels continue to play out here, with the fractured family unit consisting of a mentally unstable mother, Mary, and her neglected daughter Jane, whom she drags with her on a restless, aimless jaunt through the Pacific Northwest after being rejected and virtually ignored by Jane's father, Tom Owens, an entrepreneurial wunderkind whose basement biotech venture grew into a major company, making him a millionaire and famous. When Jane is ten, Mary decides to take a break from parenting, so she teaches her daughter to drive and forces Jane to take their battered truck and go to Owens. Met first not by him but by his close friend, the wheelchair-bound biologist Noah, who takes her in, Jane is slow to gain her father's acceptance. He then brings Mary into town, sets her and Jane up in a bungalow, but attends to them fitfully, preoccupied with a new company that spun off from the old one after it went public, and with his leggy blond girlfriend Olivia, with whom he shares a decrepit mansion but for whom his feelings wax and wane. Eventually, Jane becomes Owens's confidante, just as his fortunes change: His parent company ousts him, and long-suffering Olivia walks out. Noah, on the other hand, has luck in love and in the lab, entering the limelight while Tom, who's married someone new and become a father again, sinks farther into the shadows. A few events resonate powerfully—including an abortion Mary has (made to seem like Jane's decision), and the seduction of Noah at a Christmas party—but otherwise this is a tale too diffuse in the telling, which even the knowledge of certain roman Ö clef aspects can't overcome. (First printing of 40,000)
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-45091-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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