A novel that exhibits flashes of rich humor and intelligence, yet never gels.
An interstate odyssey chronicling a brazen hero on a journey both scatological and transcendent.
When he comes home one day, Aaron Abrams finds his brother and wife making love in his pool. He dumps a bucket of cold water on their hot scene in protest, and thus the hero’s journey begins. Immediately packing his life into his car, he heads to New York and the big book-publishing deal he’s just scored. One of the first things we learn about Aaron is his obsession with Newman’s Own lemonade, a detail that Moffie (The Organ Grinder and the Monkey, 2008, etc.) is so charmed by that he never lets readers forget it. These initially funny quirks and some uneasily episodic encounters work overtime to sustain the protracted account of Aaron’s avoidance of his family’s dissolution. After a meeting with his hot lesbian agent, she throws him an assistant so taken by his writing that an immediate bedroom session ensues. Indeed Aaron experiences so many lurid sexual encounters during his sojourn that an Ian Fleming novel seems modest by comparison. In fact, so little attention is given to the central betrayal that Aaron and his world never properly take shape. Aaron travels cross-country gathering inspiration for his next masterpiece, but nowhere in his dialogue is it evident that he writes serious books for a living. Full of self-reverential references, jokes and conversations meant to flatter the hero or plug pop-culture favorites, the central story is often left in the dust–and Moffie’s intelligence and wit, which are on display, can’t make up for it. There are some memorable moments, but there is no settlement between story or attitude, and this vacillation dilutes both. Aaron’s unexpected battle with hemorrhoids makes for some painfully funny and frank passages, but just as he becomes human, he slips back into cipherhood, leaving him only to function as wish-fulfillment. The moods are admirably varied, but the book ends with a flavor so inappropriately saccharine that it’s not the completion of a full portrait of a man, just the symptom of a story without limits.
A novel that exhibits flashes of rich humor and intelligence, yet never gels.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-0461-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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