A funny, haunting collection that refuses to ward off the “shadow hunting us down.”
Shoemaker’s debut short story collection ranges in style and acquaints characters with prospects that leave them feeling disenchanted, disturbed, and sometimes changed for the better.
Some stories are purely comedic: A suburban stay-at-home dad keeps an earnest diary of his comings and goings and efforts at attracting his wife; an adult Karate Kid fan writes a come-to-Jesus letter to the Karate Kid himself; a self-aggrandizing fiction writer pens a letter that rejects an editor’s rejection; a trip to a giant Swedish furniture store (Ikea, thinly veiled) takes a turn for the darkly—and hilariously—sci-fi. Other stories are somber: The owner of an architecture firm hires illegal immigrants to save money on office cleaning bills and gets caught; Mormon men struggle to reconcile their attachment to religious values with the harm it inflicts upon self and others; adults reconcile who they’d hoped to be with who they are; a group of cynical, burned-out teachers reckon with the murder of a student. With smart, cleareyed prose, Shoemaker depicts the excessiveness of white, upper-middle-class adulthood. His protagonists have bedroom balconies, BMWs, and strollers that “looked like NASA engineers” designed them, details which are juxtaposed against arresting descriptions of rural poverty. In spite of their shortcomings, these protagonists—white male guidance counselors, lawyers, teachers, Mormons—aren’t dismissible as caricatures. Most are intelligent, conflicted men tortured by their decisions to hurt others in the name of protecting their loved ones or their own lives. Unfortunately, female characters are less nuanced. They are props—interns, mothers, wives, romantic interests—that exist to reveal men to themselves. Still, Shoemaker makes sure that no matter how hard they try, the men here can’t ignore that they, the supposed altruistic ones, often do more harm than good.
A funny, haunting collection that refuses to ward off the “shadow hunting us down.”Pub Date: April 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9835860-2-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: No Record Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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