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TREE OF HEAVEN

A haunting captor/prisoner love story set during the Japanese occupation of China, by the author of the story collection The Light of Home (1992). The year is 1938. Captain Kuroda is a reluctant and unskilled Japanese officer, a botanist by training, tormented by memories of the Nanking massacre: the squeals of children being killed, the smell of burning flesh, the dismembered bodies, the sight of a pregnant woman bayoneted in the abdomen, the ``constant rape.'' His army has moved on, leaving him the commander of a small garrison in the rolling hills of east-central China. When he comes upon his soldiers raping a filthy and starving woman, he intervenes for reasons he doesn't fully understand, and takes her under his protection. The daughter of a doctor, Li speaks Japanese; glad of the warmth of his quarters, she cooks for him but avoids his questions. Slowly, though, communication begins: He shows her a bamboo grove and talks about plants; she suggests that she should be his mistress. Isolated from his peers, Kuroda is renewed by this woman who seems to enjoy making love to him; she responds to how much he needs her and senses in him a trustworthiness in a world bereft of trust. As the lovers each realize the impossibility of a future, their attachment intensifies. Stabbed and dying, Kuroda tells of the horrors he's witnessed; Li holds him in her arms: ``I said he could forget it now, that I would remember.'' Using spare, unadorned prose, Binstock manages evocatively to juxtapose the occupying army's totalitarian cosmos, predicated on murder, rape, and the absolute lack of safety, with the tender realm temporarily created by these two damaged but deep-feeling lovers. A first novel unrelenting in its rendition of wartime cruelty, but tempered with a bracing reminder that deep human feelings can and will sprout from scorched earth.

Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1995

ISBN: 1-56947-038-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Soho

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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