Adroitly told, but never quite demonstrates its relevance.
Second-novelist Power (Crawling at Night, 2001) proves resolutely that the South will never rise again.
The Virginia hamlet of Ball’s Bluff is pretty much the last place you’d expect to find a Dickensian Christmas party, and the author’s choice of said party as the climactic moment toward which her story stutter-steps seems arbitrary, though it works well enough. The people testifying in these pages are all connected in some fashion to the hospital (site of the party) and its resident neonatologist/unreconstructed rake, Dr. C.R. Ash. Among them are C.R.’s good friend and fellow doctor Pendleton, his fearful secretary Betty, and teeny-bopper Candy Striper Kirsten, who just gave birth (in the hospital bathroom) to a baby she didn’t know she was carrying. Although they rattle on about their own troubled lives, everyone also seems to have something to say about C.R., generally to his detriment. C.R. himself, the last scion of an old and honored family, is more attached to his bachelorhood than to just about anything; he also drinks bourbon like water and might well have made a mistake that killed one of the babies under his care. The story’s main purpose is to provide a stage upon which C.R. can pontificate, cajole, bemoan and generally chew the scenery to shreds. Much as the other characters try to make their voices heard, the novel belongs to him and on those terms succeeds. He’s a wonderful character. But his overpowering presence also makes every other element seem like window-dressing. Even the Lost Cause, a mandatory subject in any good southern tale, raises its vainglorious, preening head primarily so the author can make a none-too-subtle contrast with the cookie-cutter suburban New South, which provides C.R. with a never-ending number of opportunities to hold forth on the differences between his mother’s real honey ham and the lump of sugar-glazed death sold in modern supermarkets.
Adroitly told, but never quite demonstrates its relevance.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1720-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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