An indelibly etched mood piece for readers who don’t insist that every action needs to provoke an equal and opposite...
A Brooklyn junkyard is the center of this first novel’s hopeless universe of dully endangered crooks.
Fat Tommy Rosselli, a.k.a. Tommy Bagadonuts, is the alleged brains behind the Troutman Street operation, part salvage-yard, part chop-shop. Stoney, his partner, is an alcoholic whose grip on reality is no tighter than his hold on his family. Their employees range from yard boss Walter to used-truck chassis buyer Jimmy the Hat to Eddie Tuco, a “Nuyorican” gofer, 18, whose refusal to join his cousin Miguel’s gang has already marked him as somebody who goes his own way. After a menacing curtain-raiser in which Tuco discovers two dead teenagers when he comes in to work, Green settles down to a leisurely, yet somehow still menacing, round of anecdotes about Stoney, Tommy, and their colleagues in the salvage business. But he takes a special interest in Tuco, because although the kid is low man on the junkyard’s totem pole, he’s the only one who’s going anywhere, even as far as the nameless prostitute down the street. Just as the hooker is looking forward only as far as her next fix of “Dr. Jack,” the drug that’s given her seller-pimp the same reputation as famed suicide enabler Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Stoney and Tommy seem to have nothing better to do than mark time and hire futile protectors as whoever killed those two kids and executed junkyard accountant Marty Cohen closes in on them. The setup screams thriller, but Green throws away one sharp, threatening incident after another—and eventually his whole plot—because he’s after something more subtly disturbing: a group portrait of despair so deep that getting killed just doesn’t seem like that much of a risk.
An indelibly etched mood piece for readers who don’t insist that every action needs to provoke an equal and opposite reaction.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018822-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
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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