From the author of An Act of Love (1997), among others: a clear-eyed look at a friendship between two couples that almost implodes when a child becomes seriously ill and damaging secrets are revealed. Narrator Lucy West is married to Max and is the mother of 14-year-old Margaret and first-grader Jeremy. The Wests live in a small town, where Max is editor of the local newspaper, and life has mostly been good, but as Lucy begins her story, in June 1998, she’s suffering from panic attacks. She’s been offered a job with a prestigious ad agency in nearby Boston, and she fears that Max, who himself suffers from depression, might not be able to cope if she works full-time. As the summer progresses, Lucy finds she has to deal with even more disturbing problems, these detailed in chapters alternating with her recollections of the recent past. Lucy and Max are close friends with Kate and Chip Cunningham, parents of Matthew and Abby. The two women share confidences, their children are pals, the couples socialize and vacation together on Nantucket. As in all friendships, though, there are the inevitable moments of envy and competition. Lucy’s memories of the early years of the West/Cunningham bond reveal one especially fraught period. Lucy had a stillborn baby, and grieving Max ignored his wife, who found it hard to be friends with Kate when she gave birth to Abby shortly thereafter. A brief affair with Chip revitalized Lucy and her marriage; soon after, she was pregnant with Jeremy. But when Jeremy is diagnosed in August 1998 with cystic fibrosis, a genetically caused disease, and the doctor suggests Max be tested, Lucy has to admit that Chip could also be the father. Will her confession end not just her friendship with Kate but her marriage? Can love and loyalty endure . . . even barely? Plot-driven, yes, but there’s more than enough compensation in Thayer’s insights into the tangled webs woven by friendship. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20613-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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