Dann writes with a light touch—perhaps too light: Her portrait of private grief and public fear is delicate but slow to...
Second-novelist Dann (Mermaid, 1986; a memoir, The Baby Boat, 1998) depicts a young widow trying to raise her son in small-town Ohio during the general panic that followed the September 11th attacks.
Ash Creek is one of those sleepy midwestern towns that aren’t close to anywhere. Still, for Hanna, whose husband died of cancer recently, Ash Creek is home. A writing teacher at the local YMCA, Hanna has a little boy named Pete, who is just starting kindergarten, and the two of them are slowly adjusting to life without a man in the house. Hanna spends time in the library researching the customs of widowhood across the world, while Pete jealously holds onto his father’s old shoes and clothes. Their neighbor Thomas, a cooper at the restored colonial manor house just outside town, often stops in with small presents and watches Pete occasionally when Hanna’s babysitters are busy. And Hanna finds herself more and more attracted to him. With Pete settling into school, it looked like life was gradually returning to normal—but history had other plans. Even a place as remote as Ash Creek was bound to be rocked by the events of 9/11, especially since Pete’s best friend Omar had an uncle who died in the World Trade Center that day. Omar’s father Mazur is an Indian immigrant who runs a dry cleaning shop. After his brother-in-law’s death, he finds himself vilified as an “Arab” by local rednecks who insult him on the street and attack his shop. As one of the few Jews in Ash Creek, Hanna is sympathetic to Mazur’s plight and makes an effort to be friendly to him. But Hanna learned to fit in a long time ago—can Mazur and Omar, now?
Dann writes with a light touch—perhaps too light: Her portrait of private grief and public fear is delicate but slow to unfold and far too tentative for most of the way. Still: a nice picture of small-town life in a global age.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31666-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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