A finely drawn story of a woman losing everything and finding herself.
A woman’s unraveling life prompts her to explore her unlikely past in this literary novel by Averbach (Missing Persons, 2013, etc.), former director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center in Chautauqua, New York.
College librarian Deena Berman’s life is thrown into chaos when her husband’s poor investment decisions cost the family their beautiful home in Shaker Heights, Ohio. While packing up for the move, Deena comes across her old college application essay, which tells the story of her unusual childhood. Her lesbian mother, Leah Marcus, rejected her own affluent upbringing in order to live the life of a hippie, renaming herself Rain and living in a same-sex relationship on the New Moon Commune outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Deena was born. Deena left New Moon as a teenager, but as an adult, she faces new problems. Among other things, she loses her job after she’s suspected of stealing books, and her marriage to her husband, Martin, falls apart. Her son, Elliot, decides to join the Navy now that they can’t afford to send him to college. Her daughter, Lauren, moves in with punks and exhibits some of the countercultural tendencies that Rain did. As the setbacks pile up, Deena follows a photography professor—with whom she’s had a brief affair—to Sarasota, Florida. Things go from bad to worse, and Deena begins to unpack the secrets of her upbringing, confronting for the first time the woman her mother really was—and the woman she is as well. Averbach unspools her story with dark humor and a mounting sense of calamity. Her prose is measured yet vigorous, capturing the chagrin Deena feels with each new humiliation: “She needed help. The problem was that Martin wasn’t taking her calls. He hadn’t spoken to her since the night Elliot had unraveled the lie she’d been living. It was horrific how swiftly that idle dalliance had turned her life inside out.” Averbach approaches Deena’s problems with restraint and seriousness and has things to say about materialism and self-exploration. While some of the conclusions feel a bit preordained, any lessons take a back seat to an organic and quite captivating plot.
A finely drawn story of a woman losing everything and finding herself.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-936135-82-0
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Golden Antelope Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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