An eloquent, if bizarrely childlike, and unflinching coming-of-ager that bears mountains of grief, passion, and guilt.
An angry, viscerally felt debut tale of bad blood and rotten body parts, recounted by a black girl in Mississippi trying to make sense of her burgeoning sexuality amid the sin-scarred folk around her.
Fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield’s first awkward step into adolescence is drawing a flat-chested naked Eve in red lipstick over the page of Genesis in her Bible study class. Maddy is her Mama’s one hope in life: Faye Dangerfield is a God-fearing, generous-fleshed, “useful” woman who serves as a maid to white people of Pyke County in order to pay her alcoholic husband’s gambling debts to Jesus Sanders, the town bully. Maddy’s no-good-nik illiterate daddy has one arm, Mama’s mother having chopped the other off and fed it to the hog when he was caught fooling around with Mama’s hustler sister Pip—who lies in her house on Commitment Road, dying of breast cancer. Rounding out the gallery of exemplars to guide Maddy into adulthood is Uncle Sugar, a castrated “number” languishing in jail after being set upon by a mob avenging his rape of a local white girl. Sagging flesh, rotten “titties,” and the paralyzing fingers of men plague Maddy the summer she is sent solo to care for her aunt Pip because her Mama can’t face her, and the novel gradually takes form around Maddy’s redemptive care of the fallen women. Vernon’s prose is colloquial and fleshed with figurative leaps, the brutality of her images alternately fascinating and repellant. There is a hard-bitten story in each of these characters, and young Maddy, largely self-taught from the encyclopedias Mama buys her, remains wary, determined not to confuse indebtedness to Jesus Sanders with allegiance to the real Jesus. While the denouement could go any way—how will Maddy be wrenched from her Edenic innocence?—Vernon uses Pip’s illness to steer Maddy into a final feminist baptism, in an over-the-top transcendent vision that ultimately strains the reader’s credulity.
An eloquent, if bizarrely childlike, and unflinching coming-of-ager that bears mountains of grief, passion, and guilt.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1728-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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