A sharply written seaside story that could have had more wind in its sails, had it relied on better navigation charts.
In Clement’s (This Old House, 2011) novel, disparate characters’ lives intersect at a friendly neighborhood bar in Portland, Maine.
“When you’re weary, feeling small / When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all”: so goes the Simon & Garfunkel classic “Bridge over Troubled Water.” These lines seem to apply to Sean, a lively young businessman and lifetime Mainer whose plans for a vibrant life with his wife, Stella, are cut short when he loses his legs in a hit-and-run. However, he still derives a measure of comfort from his bar, Troubled Waters, in the Old Port section of Portland, which he operates with his business partner, Jacob Morrison. Their 23-year-old waitress, simply named Elvis, has an intriguing back story of her own that’s slowly teased out over the course of the novel. At Troubled Waters, it seems that everybody knows your name—but scratch the veneer of the Cheers-like atmosphere and one finds a hint of menace lurking in the form of bar regular Quentin T. Spence, a troubled academic whose unbridled lust has disturbing consequences. Clement astutely observes each character’s back story, even if Elvis and Quentin get the lion’s share of the spotlight, and the crisp prose is tinged with just the right amount of suspense and intrigue. Despite the careful execution, however, these individual elements stop short of seamlessly combining into a larger tapestry. The novel doesn’t clearly establish the different characters’ interconnectedness before going off on various plot tangents. For example, the story starts by focusing on Sean’s troubles but before long, he’s just part of the scenery when the action shifts completely to Elvis and, later, Quentin’s skin-crawling behavior. After a few more detours, the novel becomes a slickly executed police procedural, but it’s not quite clear whether that’s what the author—and readers—signed up for.
A sharply written seaside story that could have had more wind in its sails, had it relied on better navigation charts.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7840-6
Page Count: 306
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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