An erudite, richly layered, and unsettling psychological tale.
A grieving mother embarks on a mind-expanding journey in this novel.
Lily, or “Lily the Pink,” as she is known at “naked yoga,” is a 60-something woman who is a member of the “strictly-by-invitation-only” website “come-to-woody.com.” The site allows “perfectly respectable” professionals to meet for anonymous sexual encounters in a “secret little wood somewhere north of Hampstead Heath,” London. She has a strained relationship with Gemma, her 29-year-old daughter, who “doesn’t approve of” her lifestyle. And yet elements of Lily’s hedonism are linked to her first child, Tommy, who died at 8 after slipping out of the hands of his irritated father, Frank, at bathtime and suffering a fatal fall. During one of her ventures to Hampstead Heath, the air-conditioning on Lily’s classic Mercedes fails. In the heat, she begins to experience strange phenomena. She sees her dead son in the eyes of a fly she identifies as the angel Ithuriel. She later encounters two men, one of whom she instantly recognizes as “the devil incarnate.” All the while, Lily consults with her alter ego, Bella, nicknamed the “Unexploded Bomb.” As in his previous novels, Cacoyannis (The Madness of Grief, 2018, etc.) deftly builds complex psychological portraits of his characters. Here, his fiction employs magic realism to both blur and sharpen Lily’s shifting mindscape. As she sits in the suffocating heat of the car, her altering vision is at first understandable: “Trickles of sweat had already found their way into her eyes, but she could see. The slight blurriness—the effect was of an old-fashioned photograph fuzzy from the grain of excessive enlargement.” Aberrations in her vision later become the “colourful brushstrokes” of a migraine aura, but she also inexplicably sees, behind a fly’s “ruby domes,” unmistakable eyes far more piercing than hers, belonging to her dead son. The author delights in leading readers to the unsteady territory between the possible and the impossible. His writing is intentionally disorienting and unnervingly addictive as readers grapple to make sense of two or more separate realities sewn seamlessly together. Cacoyannis is known for his introspective protagonists, but in this exceptional novel he delves even deeper, excavating the darkest corners of the psyche.
An erudite, richly layered, and unsettling psychological tale.Pub Date: April 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79879-080-9
Page Count: 167
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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