Rough start but finally builds into an engaging debut.
First novel from a new press that focuses on original literary paperbacks (see Grimes, above). This tyro’s effort, however, is far less of a treasure than Grimes’s psychopharmacological whiz.
Back in the mid-’90s, Martin Sierra, an unpublished young Spanish/American writer abandoned by his poetess mother in childhood, now rooms in Brooklyn but is a habitué of Alphabet City clubs on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He may well have a collection of rejection slips heavier than the Sunday New York Times. His latest poems have come back with a mustard smear and not even the courtesy of a rejection slip. Martin cruises clubs looking for girls, but he even gets turned down by hookers in automobiles. Drinks quite a bit. Best bud is Nikki, a lesbian dreamboat who may neck with him at ear-banging clubs but who won’t let him on board. The clubs rave with freak scenes, and from the Useless-Nameless band a transvestite entertainer in emerald wig and wrapped only in Saran Wrap sings to trendies, B-list models, groovers high on X, eccentrics, and fashion victims. And Nikki dances with Martin, letting it all hang out! She’s just priceless! Sweet heaven! And on Second Street at 3 p.m., wild-assed kids with assorted mental problems mix with homeless crackheads. A Japanese firm’s Air Shipping clerk, Marty self-publishes his first book, Idealism and Early Wish-fulfillment, and spends six months hustling it on St. Marks Place, selling sixty copies. He also follows The Village Voice personals closely, has his own ad in the back, writes long letters to women who answer. He’s supposed to meet Lola in front of Kim’s Video on St. Marks Place. Is she this petite goth girl, clutching a bouquet of barbed wire, mincing past? Body-pierced Lola’s an art student who paints hyper-real scenes of intense psychopathic violence. Then comes Amaris, who, unbuckling him, says, “Hurry up, you sexist prick.”
Rough start but finally builds into an engaging debut.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9713415-9-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ludlow Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
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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